' 






Glass BTe^- S 

Book Cx 8, 



/ 

THE 

APPROACHING END OF THE AGE 

VIEWED IN THE LIGHT OF , 

HISTORY, PROPHECY/ AND SCIENCE. 



BY 



H. GRATTAN GUINNESS. 



'Ap/rjv £pxov, Kvpie *Itj<tov. 

Hefo fgorfc : . 
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON ; 
714, BROADWAY. 



MDCCCLXXXI. 



PREFACE TO 
THE AMERICAN EDITION. 



IN publishing by request an American edition of this work 
(now in its sixth edition in England) we recall with deep 
interest our prolonged visit to the United States and Canada 
(1860-1862), the great kindness we then received from 
American Christians of various denominations, and the much 
happy fellowship enjoyed amongst -them. We feel the more 
pleasure in now commending to all those who love our Lord 
Jesus Christ in sincerity, this attempt to develop the harmony 
traceable between the Word, the Works, and the Providence of 
God, in their relation to "that blessed hope, the glorious 
appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ." 

It was indeed during that visit to America that the pre- 
liminary studies which issued in the publication of this volume 
were first undertaken. Interrupted during many years by the 
pressure of evangelistic labours in various parts of the world, 
they were subsequently resumed when the more settled life 
necessitated by our present work of training young men for 
missionaries in " the Regions Beyond " * afforded the oppor- 

* See Appendix C. 



PREFACE. 



tunity ; and they were pursued more or less closely for several 
years. The book has now been for more than two years 
before the public, and has received the cordial approval of 
those best able to judge of its merits. It is therefore with 
perfect confidence in the correctness of the numerous facts, 
historical, chronological, and scientific, on which the con- 
clusions here drawn are based, that we now present it to the 
consideration of the Christians of America, inviting them to 
use their own judgment as to the solemnly momentous 
conclusions themselves. 

We are fully aware that as yet Premillennial Views are not 
only not widely held or taught in America, but that there exists 
against them, on the part of the large majority, no slight 
prejudice. Here in England, while a similar state of things 
is still to a certain extent prevalent, yet a large, influential 
and increasing section of the Church of Christ, including 
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and members of almost 
all denominations, have fully received and unhesitatingly hold 
such views. Ought not this fact to weigh with our Ameri- 
can friends, at least to the extent of leading them fairly to 
examine the subject. Views that have commanded the hearty 
adhesion of such men as Sir Isaac Newton, Mede, Elliott, 
Bickersteth, T. R. Birks, Bonar, Dean Alford, and multitudes 
of godly, sober-minded students of Scripture, should not surely 
be lightly esteemed, or rejected without examination, espe- 
cially by American Ministers of the Gospel. As they desire 
to be found obedient to the precept, " Prove all things, 



PREFACE, 



hold fast that which is good/' we would urge them to 
search the Scriptures on this important subject. They have 
the advantage of being to a great extent free from ecclesias- 
tical trammels, and from the bondage of precedent ; free to 
form their own conclusions on a subject of this kind, and to 
proclaim what they believe to be truth. Let them not be 
prejudiced against these views by the injudicious excesses 
of some who have held and taught them in the United 
States, nor by any optimist political or social sentiments, 
or national aspirations. Such must be baseless, unless in 
accordance with Scripture, and should therefore be tested by 
it, instead of used as a test against it. Let them bring to the 
study that simple, candid, unprejudiced frame of mind which 
alone is likely to lead to a clear perception of truth. 

We understand that such public teaching on prophetic 
subjects as does exist in America, is mostly by that futurist 
school of interpreters, whose expositions naturally fail to satisfy 
thoughtful minds, because consisting so largely of dogmatic 
predictions of what is to be, instead of pointing to what has 
been, and is, and comparing that, with what God foretold ages 
ago, should be. In the preparation of this volume we have 
endeavoured to remember that we are not called to be 
prophets, but students and expounders of the sacred word 
of prophecy. 

If apology be needed for presenting to the American public 
another work on a subject already treated by very able pens, 
it is found in this, that two-thirds of this volume are an 



PREFACE. 



entirely new and original contribution towards its elucidation, 
based on facts drawn from the realms of science and his- 
tory. The other third, which traverses ground already well 
explored, has this advantage over earlier works, that the date 
at which we wrote gave us the advantage of reading in the 
light of their own fulfilment the prophecies .of the destruction 
of the temporal power of the Papacy, and those of the decay 
of the Ottoman Empire, and thus of testing the various chro- 
nological approximations which have previously been made. 

And now we commend this volume to the candour of 
our American readers, and above all to the blessing of God. 
May we earnestly endeavour to ascertain the Truth of God 
upon the subject here dealt with, and may the God of 
Truth Himself be our Teacher, and sanctify us by the know- 
ledge we attain. 

Lastly, may grace be given to all who look for the speedy 
coming of our Lord to prove they do so by their spirit, their 
labours, and their lives ! " What manner of persons ought 
we to be in all holy conversation and godliness ? n How 
should we reflect upon a dark world the glow of the coming 
sunrise ! How should we abound in our labours for the Lord, 
and that " so much the more " as we more clearly " see the 
day approaching ? " 

East London Institute for 

Home and Foreign Missions, 

Harley House, Bow, E. 
August nth, 1880. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 



THE volume now presented to the Christian public, consists 
as will be observed, of four parts : the first is commended 
to the candid consideration of those who have not yet received 
the truth of the premillennial advent of our Lord Jesus Christ , 
the second and third take that truth as proved and granted, 
and address themselves especially to those who, holding pre- 
millennial views, are still looking for the manifestation of 
Antichrist, prior to the visible advent of Christ, those who 
adopt a literal interpretation of the Apocalyptic prophecies, 
including their chronological features — in other words, to the 
futurist school of prophetic interpreters. The fourth and last 
part, which consists of an investigation into the system oj times 
and seasons presented in the word and works of God, contains^ 
not a few original observations and discoveries, which, if the 
author mistakes not, throw fresh light on the whole subject of 
Scripture prophecy, and which he thinks will be found of inter- 
est to all students of the prophetic word, as well as, he trusts, 
to all lovers of the Bible. Perhaps, he cannot better introduce 
the book to the reader, than by giving a brief outline of its 
history. 

Imbued by education with the ordinary view, that a gradual 
improvement in the present state of things was to be expected 



PREFACE, 



till all the world should be converted, and a spiritual kingdom 
of God be universally established on earth, and that no return 
of Christ was to be looked for till the day of judgment at 
the end of the world, — the author no sooner began to study 
the Scriptures independently than he perceived, that this view 
obliged him to interpret in a forced and non-natural manner 
a vast variety of apparently clear and simple passages, both in 
the Old and New Testaments. Unable to rest satisfied with 
doing this, he was led to read a variety of works, both for and 
against premillennial views, especially that most able treatise 
ever penned against them, entitled " Christ's Second Coming, 
will it be Premillennial ? " by Dr. David Brown, of Aberdeen. 
Unable to reach any decision satisfactory to himself by this 
study of prophetic works, the author nearly twenty years ago 
laid them all aside, and very carefully and critically read 
through the entire Bible, marking, studying and considering 
every passage bearing on the subject, with a view to collect 
the full testimony of the Word of God respecting it. This plan 
he would earnestly commend to those who may be in doubt as 
to the truth on this fundamental point. It completely set his 
own mind at rest, and his views have never been shaken since. 
That a premillennial advent of Christ is clearly predicted in the 
Word of God, the writer never afterwards doubted, or hesitated 
to preach ; but the pressing claims of incessant evangelistic 
labours for many years, forbad his looking further into pro- 
phetic subjects. 

A fuller acquaintance, acquired by personal observation, 
vith the condition of the Greek and other professing Christiaa 



PREFACE. xi 



Churches of Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, and of the effects of 
Mohammedan rule in the East, and also with the Papal system 
as developed in France and Spain, and with the Continental 
infidelity to which it has given rise, subsequently led the 
author to a careful study of the history of the Mohammedan 
and Papal powers, and of the prophecies of Scripture believed 
by many to relate to them. This resulted in a deep conviction 
that those Powers occupy in the Word of God, as pro- 
minent A PLACE AS THEY HAVE ACTUALLY HELD IN THE 
HISTORY OF THE CHURCH. 

The remarkable events of the years 1866-70, especially the 
outbreak of the Franco-German war, which put a stop to 
evangelistic efforts which the author had been for some time 
making in Paris, led him not only still further to consider the 
question of modern fulfilment of prophecy, but to prepare a 
work on the subject, which he intended to have published 
under the title of " Foretold and Fulfilled." This work advo- 
cated the Protestant or historic system of interpreting the sym- 
bolic prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse, and in doing 
so had necessarily to consider the question which lies at the 
base of the different views of unfulfilled prophecy taken by 
Christians — the true meaning of the chronological state7?ients 
contained in symbolic prophecy, i.e., whether they are literal 
or whether they are figurative. In studying the masterly and 
exhaustive treatise of the Rev. T. R. Birks on this subject,* 



"First Elements of Sacred Prophecy, including an examination of 
several recent Expositions, and of the Year-day Theory," by the Rev. T. 
R. Birks, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 



xii PREFACE. 

the author was deeply interested in a statement made on the 
authority of a Swiss astronomer, M. De Cheseaux, that the 
leading prophetic periods of Scripture are demonstrably celes- 
tial cycles ; that is, periods as definitely marked off as such by 
celestial revolutions, as are our ordinary years or days. This 
led him to examine the nature of these cycles, and to investigate 
the connection between astronomic facts and Scripture chrono- 
logy, and thus to the discovery that the epacts of the prophetic 
periods of Scripture form a remarkable septiform series. 

Practical duties of a pressing nature connected with the 
foundation of the author's East London Institute for 
Home and Foreign Missions,* prevented the completion 
of the intended volume, and the papers connected with the 
astronomic measures of the prophetic times lay by for some 
years in the hands of the Rev. T. R. Birks of Cambridge. 

But in 1876-7, when the long impending Eastern question 
came once more to the front, and attention was, by the tragic 
and eventful scenes transpiring in European Turkey, again 
directed to evident cotemporaneous fulfilments of prophecy, 
the author was strongly impressed with the duty of giving to 
his brethren without further delay, any light which God might 
have given him on this sacred and deeply interesting theme \ 
of adding his contribution, however small, towards the under- 
standing of the prophetic word, and in spite of many difficulties 
he has made leisure, during the last eighteen months, to com- 
plete his researches into the subject, and prepare the present 
volume for the press. 

* See Appendix C. 



PREFACE. xiii 



In order to secure correctness in his astronomic statements, 
the author submitted a considerable portion of the fourth part 
of this work to the criticisms of Professor Adams of Cambridge, 
whose discovery of the planet Neptune by pure mathematical 
calculation, has long given him a position of the very highest 
eminence, as an authority in astronomic science. Professor 
Adams was kind enough to allow the author to read to him 
many (though not quite all) of his statements on " the connec- 
tion of Times and Seasons natural and revealed," and he also 
verified some of M. De Cheseaux's calculations with reference 
to the cyclical character of the prophetic Times. Finding M. 
De Cheseaux's work in the British Museum, the author had it 
carefully copied for his own use, and subsequently sent it to 
Professor Adams that he might examine a point about which 
he had expressed some doubt, relative to the times of the 
equinoxes and of the summer solstice in the year of Daniel's 
vision 552 B.C. 

The following letter from Professor Adams shows M. De 
Cheseaux to have been slightly in error on this point, — error 
easily accounted for by the want, in his day, of such accurate 
data as more modern science supplies — but which does not 
in the least affect his conclusions as to the cyclical character of 
the prophetic Times : — 

Observatory, Cambridge, March 18, 1878. 
My dear Sir, 

I received the copy of De Cheseaux safely, and I ought ere this 
to have sent you the result of my examination into the correctness of his 
statements. Pray pardon the delay, which has been caused by my having 
been so busy. I have calculated veiy approximately the times of the 



xiv PREFACE. 



29 


II 


39 


29 


II 


5i 


27 





17 



equinoxes and solstices for the year B.C. 552, which is that given by Da 
Cheseaux as the year of Daniel's vision, and I find the following results, 
expressed in mean time at Jerusalem, reckoned from midnight. 

d. h. m. 

Vernal equinox ... March ... 27 8 2 

Summer solstice ... June 

Autumnal equinox ... Sept. 

Winter solstice ... Dec. 

Hence the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox take place not far 
from noon at Jerusalem, but the vernal equinox takes place about four hours 
before noon. De Cheseaux's error appears to arise chiefly from his having 
supposed that the excentricity of the earth's orbit was the same in the time 
of Daniel as in his own time, whereas it was very sensibly greater. I have 
added the time of the winter solstice also, though it is not required for 

your purpose The fact is that the change of excentricity and place of 

the apse of the orbit of any planet, is a compound phenomenon, due to the 
combined action of all the other planets, and therefore the final result is 
got by compounding together several variable quantities, which have quite 
different and indeed incommensurable periods. I will return your copy of 
De Cheseaux, which is quite beautifully done, immediately, either by post 
or railway, as I have done with it. 

I remain, dear sir, 

Yours very truly, 

J. C. Adams. 

As his letter did not reach the author in time to allow of 
his adding Professor Adams's correction to M. De Cheseaux's 
statement quoted on p. 404 of this work, he inserts it here.* 
The modern solar and lunar tables employed by Professor 
Adams, also showed some slight errors in M. De Cheseaux's 
calculations, amounting to about an hour in the period of 1040 
years (referred to on p. 403) but in nowise invalidating the 
claim of that period to be considered a cycle harmonizing the 

* The statement referred to has been omitted in this edition. 



PREFACE. xv 



lunar month with the solar year, or the cyclical character of 
the associated prophetic periods of 1260 and 2300 years, of 
which it is the difference. 

The author has also to acknowledge his indebtedness to 
the kind and valued criticisms of his friends, the Rev. Henry 
Brooke of Dovercourt, and Philip Henry Gosse, Esq., F.R.S., 
of Torquay, who saw portions of the prophetic parts of this 
work while it was passing through the press. Their accurate 
acquaintance with the prophetic Scriptures, and deep reverence 
for the Word of God, gave the suggestions they made a special 
value in this principal branch of the subject dealt with. 

There remains to the author the grateful task of acknowledg- 
ing the very considerable help he has had in writing and revising 
this volume from the practised pen of his beloved wife, for 
many years the sharer of his toils in various efforts to spread 
in different lands the knowledge of saving or of sanctifying 
Truth. The part which — in spite of much wearying labour 
by day and often by night, as Honorary Secretary of the 
East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions 
— she has cheerfully taken in the task of preparing this work 
— however others may regard the result — will endear it to him 
while memory endures. 

And now the author commends this work to the candour 
of the Christian Reader, and above all to the blessing of God ! 
He alone knows how earnestly and incessantly the enlighten- 
ings of his own Holy Spirit have been sought, in the course 
of its preparation, how often the heartfelt prayer, " O send out 
thy light and thy truth, let them lead me," has gone up amid 



xvi PREFACE. 

the studies of which it is the result. The Bible has been the 
main field explored, in the conviction, "in thy light we shall 
see light ; " and in giving to the Church of Christ, the light on 
this high and holy subject, which has, he humbly believes, 
been granted in response to much prayer, he desires to ascribe 
to the only wise God, the giver of understanding, all glory, 
and honour, and praise. Of all his good gifts, knowledge, 
true knowledge of Him, of his works, of his word, and of 
his ways, is one of the best ; and we are commanded to grow 
in such knowledge. 

If this work lead his brethren in the ministry to an increased 
study of the Prophetic Scriptures, the author will feel richly 
rewarded, whether his own conclusions be received or not. 
He is conscious that his researches into the Divine system of 
times and seasons have goiie but a little way into the subject ', 
but his hope is that they may serve to indicate to abler minds 
and pens, a vein of ore which will richly repay working. 

To one feature of the investigation he begs to call special 
attention. It deals not with theories but with facts : it 
consists not of speculations about the future, which are alto- 
gether foreign to it, and in which the writer has not the least 
inclination to indulge ; it consists in a collection of facts, and 
of inferences drawn from those facts. The author has endea- 
voured to deal with the question, What are the facts of the 
world's history and chronology ? What are the facts as to the 
nature, the objects, and the fulfilment of Scripture prophecy? 
What are the ascertained facts as to the plan of Providence ? 
What are the. facts as to the system of Times and Seasons in 



PREFACE. xvii 

Nature — the periodicity of vital phenomena, and the majestic 
revolutions of the worlds whose movements control the entire 
progress of terrestrial time ? What are the links of connection 
between these facts ? What are the laws which control them ? 
What is the chronological system to which these chronological 
elements belong ? The answers to these questions have been 
sought with care, and patient reflection. The inductive method 
has been followed throughout ; the facts of revelation and the 
facts of nature, have been collected and compared ; a broad 
basis has been thus constructed ; and the conclusions reached 
have been limited, as far as possible, to legitimate inferences 
from the facts considered. The author claims that a candid 
consideration of the fourth part of this volume should prevent 
its ever being confounded with a class of writings which pro- 
perly fail to command the attention of sober-minded Christian 
students. A wide distinction exists and should be recognised 
between students and expositors of the Word and Works of God, 
who humbly, soberly, and reverently searching into the facts 
of Nature and Scripture, of providence and of prophecy, reach 
conclusions which sanctified common sense can approve, — and 
speculators, who running away with isolated and mysterious 
expressions, indulge in imaginations of their own, and become 
prophets, instead of students of Divine prophecy. No employ- 
ment of human intelligence is nobler, than an adoring inves- 
tigation of the revealed purposes of God, " which things the 
angels desire to look into," while few are so puerile, as a pre- 
sumptuous pretence of predicting the future, apart from such 
cautious and careful study of Divine revelation. 



xviii PREFACE. 



In conclusion, the author would strongly deprecate the false 
and foolish popular notion, that all study of prophecy is un- 
practical — a notion too often propagated by passing, but mis- 
chievously-influential allusions to the subject, from pulpit, 
platform, and press, made by those who know little either of 
it, or of its effects. It ought to be a sufficient rebuke to the 
levity that hazards such an assertion, or admits such an idea, 
, to recall the facts, that one-third of the Bible consists of 
> prophecy ■ and that our Lord and Master said, " Search the 
Scriptures," not a portion of them. The apostle Peter ex- 
pressly tells us that we do well to take heed to the " more 
sure word of prophecy," as to a light shining in a dark place 
until the day dawn and the day star arise. Is it unpractical 
to make use of a good lantern on a pitch-dark night, in 
traversing a dangerous road ? or is it not rather unpractical 
and unreasonable to attempt to dispense with it? And 
further, a special and emphatic blessing is attached to this 
study in the closing book of the Bible : " Blessed is he 
that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, 
and keep the things that are written therein, for the time is 
at hand." 

It is a reflection of the gravest kind on the wisdom of 
God, to suppose that the study of a branch of truth to which 
He has in his word accorded singular prominence, should 
have an injurious tendency, or be devoid of a directly sanc- 
tifying effect : and moreover it is a conclusion completely at 
variance with all the facts of history and experience. Enoch 
was a student of prophecy, and of prophecy that is to this 



PREFACE. xix 



day unfulfilled, and Enoch was the saintliest of men, an 
eminently holy and practical preacher, who walked with God 
three hundred years, and was not, for God took him, and 
before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased 
God. Noah was a student of unfulfilled prophecy, and 
Scripture presents no more practical preacher of righteous- 
ness than he was. All the holy prophets were students, 
and diligent students, too, of their own and of each other's 
predictions, and especially of their chronological predictions. 
"The prophets inquired and searched diligently, searching 
what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in 
them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of 
Christ, and the glories that should follow" (i Pet. i. 10, n). 
Daniel was a student of unfulfilled prophecy, yet he was not 
only a practical statesman, but a man of singular holiness, 
classed with Noah and Job as one of the most righteous of men. 
There is everything in the nature of the study to make those 
who pursue it both practical and holy. It imbues the mind 
with the counsels and judgment of God about the affairs and 
events of earth ; it reveals what shall be, and thereby lessens 
the inordinate power of that which is now, bringing the spirit 
under the influence of things unseen and eternal, and thereby 
weakening that of things seen and temporal. It affords to 
hope much needed food, lacking which we must languish 
and grow feeble ; and to faith and love peculiar stimulus 
and enjoyment. Without an intelligent acquaintance with the 
teaching of the prophetic word, no man of God is or can be 
thoroughly furnished to all good works, for it is part of the " all 



PREFACE. 



Scripture " given by inspiration, and profitable for the purpose 
of rendering him so. 

Perhaps one reason for the prevailing neglect of prophetic 
expositions and preaching will be found on reflection, to lie, not 
in the fact that it is ^practical, but rather in the fact that it is 
so peculiarly practical, that few have the boldness and courage 
to face the ridicule, opposition, and contempt it is sure to 
incur in the world. Jeremiah lived on the eve and in the crisis 
of a day of judgment on the apostate professing people of God. 
He was commissioned to deliver prophetic discourses full of 
denunciations of coming judgment, and of chronological state- 
me?its of its proximity and duration. We know what Jere- 
miah's lot was, and few are prepared to play his sad and thank- 
less role in society ! 

So far from the study and exposition of the prophetic word 
being profitless and vain, we believe it is impossible to esti- 
mate the loss sustained by the Church, or the injury done to 
the world, by the very general and unjustifiable neglect of it. 
Is it not so that where one prophetic discourse is delivered, 
ten thousand doctrinal and practical sermons are preached ? 
By what authority do we thus shelve a line of truth to which 
divine wisdom has given such prominence in Scripture ? Is it 
not our duty to declare " the whole cou?isel of God " ? Those 
who have carefully looked into this subject, solemnly and with 
good ground believe, that the " word " we are commanded to 
" preach " is full of evidence that the long predicted and long 
delayed judgments on the Papal and Mohammedan powers, 
which are not only already begun, but are fast accomplishing 



PREFACE. xxi 



before our eyes, are to issue, and that speedily, in such a 
burning of " Babylon the Great," as will light up all Christen- 
dom with its lurid glow, — the immediate precursor, if it be not 
the accompaniment, of the glorious advent of the King of 
kings. With all earnestness and sobriety of mind they assure 
their brethren that it is their deep conviction that this is 
the testimony of sacred Scripture ; yet multitudes of Christian 
teachers, without even taking the trouble of examining into the 
subject, still preach the contrary, or imply it in their preach- 
ing ; not from well-grounded conviction of its truth, but from 
educational prejudice, or mere force of habit. Is this right ? 
Ought not every minister of the word to study for himself the 
teachings of Scripture, until he is satisfied that he has attained 
the truth on this momentous theme ? 

For if we are right — if there be unequivocal proof m the 
inspired volume, proof thai no previous generation of Christians 
was in a position to appreciate as we are, that the day of 
Christ is at hand — that the time for evangelising the nations, 
and gathering in the church of the first-born is speedily to 
expire — that the long day of grace to the Gentiles is all but 
over, and that apostate Christendom, so long spared by the 
goodness of God, is soon to be cut off by his righteous 
severity — that the mystery of God is all but finished, and his 
manifested rule about to be inaugurated — that the great closing 
Armageddon conflict is at hand, and the complete overthrow 
of the confederated hosts of evil — if we be right in believing 
that scarcely a single prophecy in the whole Bible, relating to 
events prior to the second advent of Christ remains unfulfilled 



xxu PREFACE. 



— if we be right, — then surely every pulpit in England should 
be ringing with timely testimony to these truths, — surely these 
solemn and most momentous facts ought not, in the preaching 
of any of God's faithful witnesses throughout the world, to 
be passed by in silence. And who that has not studied the 
subject can be in a position to say that we are not right — 
that these things are not so ? 

May such a spirit as the Bereans had of old, be granted 
to the Christians of this generation, that they may diligently 
search the " more sure word of prophecy," and draw directly 
from that sacred fountain the Truth as to the fast approach- 
ing future, which God has graciously revealed ; and may this 
volume, through his blessing, prove in such researches, helpful 
to not a few. 

East London Institute for 

Home and Foreign Missions, 

Harley House, Bow, E. 



Mar. 2ist, 1878. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



^art I. 

Progressive Revelation. 

CHAPTER I. 

God's Revelation of Himself to Man has been a Progressive one. — Truth 
in General has been Revealed Progressively. — Prophecy, the Divine 
History of the Future, consists of a Series of Progressive Revelations. 
— Practical Results of the Comprehension and Application of this 
Principle p. I 

CHAPTER II. 

Progressive Revelations as to the Relative Period of the Second Advent of 
our Lord Jesus Christ . p. 1 7 

CHAPTER III. 
Progressive Revelations as to the Millennium, the Resurrection, and the 
Judgment . * . •.•.... p» 55 



$art 11. 

Progressive Interpretation. 

CHAPTER I. 

Human Comprehension of Divine Prophecy has been, and was intended to 
be, Progressive. — Three Important Inferences from Dan. xii. 9. — There 



CONTENTS. 



is a Blameless and a Guilty Ignorance of the Fulfilment of Prophecy. 
— Instances of each. — Reasons for a Partial and Temporary Obscurity 
of Prophecy ; and Means by which Progressive Comprehension of its 
Signification has been Granted p. 79 

CHAPTER II. 

Consideration of certain Broad Principles on which the Apocalypse is to 
be Interpreted. — It is a Symbolic Prophecy, and must be Translated 
into Ordinary Language before it can be Understood . p. 99 

CHAPTER III. 

The Apocalypse is a Continuous Prophecy, extending from its own Time 
to the Consummation of all Things. — Importance of Historical Know- 
ledge, in order to its Correct Interpretation. — It is a Prophecy con- 
cerning the Experiences of the Christian Church in the World , and 
not concerning those of the Jewish Nation . , . . p. no 



?art III. 

Foretold and Fulfilled. 

CHAPTER I. 

Babylon the Great. 

ihe Prophecies of " Babylon " and "the Beast." — Reasons for the Exami- 
nation of these two Prophecies. — Fundamental, Divinely Interpreted; 
practically important. — Babylon the Great represents the Apostate 
Church of Rome p. 139 

CHAPTER II. 

The Man of Sin, or Antichrist. 

A great Fourfold Prophecy of Fundamental Importance (Dan. vii. 7-27 ; 

Rev. xiii. 1-9; Rev. xvii. ; 2 Thess. ii.). — The Roman Power. — Its 

last Form as Predicted here. — Individual and Dynastic Use of the word 

' King."— An Apostate, Blasphemous, and Persecuting Power, exactly 



CONTENTS. 



answering to the one here Predicted, has been in Existence for more 
than Twelve Centuries, in the Succession of the Popes of Rome. — 
Origin of this Power. — Its Moral Character. — Its Self-exalting Utter- 
ances. — Its Self-exalting Acts. — Its Subtleties, False Doctrines, and 
Lying Wonders. — Its Idolatries. — Its Dominion. — Its Persecution of 
the Saints. — Its Duration. — Its Doom . . , , p. 160 



?art IV. 

Inquiry into the Divine System of Times and Seasons, 
Natural and Revealed. 

SECTION I. 
Solar and Lunar Dominion, Causal and Chronological. 

CHAPTER I. 
Chronology, Biblical and Natural. Is there Harmony between the Two? 

Solar and Lunar Dominion in the Inorganic World. 
Soli-lunar Control of Terrestrial Revolutions. — Winds. — Rains. — Ocean 
Currents. — Tides. — Electric and Magnetic Variations. . p. 230 

CHAPTER II. 
Soli-lunar Dominion in the Organic World. 
Effects of Light and Heat on the Development and Distribution of Plants 
and Animals, and of the Human Race. — Diurnal and Seasonal 
Changes in Relation to Health and Disease . . . p. 245 

SECTION II. 
The Law of Completion in Weeks. 

CHAPTER I. 

The Week in Relation to the Periodicity of Vital 
Phenomena. 

Periodicity in the Development of Insects, Fishes, Birds, and Mammalia. 
— Periodicity in the Growth and Functional Activity of Mankind in 
Health and in Disease p. 25S 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER II. 

The Week in Scripture. 

There is a Chronological System in Scripture. — It is a System of Weeks. — 
This System is Traceable throughout the Law, the Prophets, and the 
Gospel. — The Week in the Mosaic Ritual. — The Week in Jewish 
History. — The Week in Prophecy.— The Week of Days. — Of Weeks. 
—Of Months.— Of Years.— Of Weeks of Years.— Of Years of Years. 
Of Millenaries p. 270 

CHAPTER III. 

The Week in History. 

Scripture the Chart of History. — Preliminary Questions as to Historic and 
Prophetic Chronology. — The Age of the Human Race. — Old Testa- 
ment Chronology. — The Hebrew and the Septuagint Chronology 
compared. — How are we to Interpret the Symbolic Periods of Pro- 
phetic Chronology? — Exposition and Defence of the Year-Day System. 
— Moral Features distinguishing the Three Great Dispensations, The 
Patriarchal, The Jewish, The Christian. — Chronological Measures of 
these Dispensations. — The Period of " Seven Times " shown to be the 
Duration of the Last or Gentile Dispensation, and also of the Two 
Earlier p. 284 

SECTION III. 

Soli-lunar Cycles, and their Relation to the Chrono- 
logy of History. 

CHAPTER I. 

Solar and Lunar Supremacy in the Ordering of Terrestriai 

Time p. 388 

CHAPTER II. 
Difficulty of Harmonizing Solar and Lunar Measures. 
The Calendar and its History p. 392 



CONTENTS. xxvii 



CHAPTER III. 

Cyclical Character of the Prophetic Periods of Daniel and 

the Apocalypse. 

Discoveries of M. de Cheseaux ■ . p. 399 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Prophetic Times and their Epacts . . p. 407 

CHAPTER V. 

Soli-lunar Measures of our Lord's Earthly Lifetime, and of 
Human History as a Whole . . p. 449 

CHAPTER VI. 
Concluding Remarks. 
The Bearing of the Divine System of Times and Seasons nere Investigated 
on the Futurist System of Interpreting the Prophecies of Daniel and 
John ; on the Evidence of the Inspiration of Scripture, and on the 
Chronological Point now reached in Human History, — the Nearness 
of the End of the Age p. 461 

APPENDIX A. 
Relation of Levitical and Prophetic Chronology to Soli-lunar Revolutions. 
— The Jubilee.— Chronology of the "Seventy Weeks." — The Mes- 
sianic Cycle. — Secular Soli-lunar Cycles. — The Epact. 

Calendar of the "Times of the Gentiles." 
Part I. —Calendar of the Four Great Empires from the Era of Nabonas- 

sar to the End of the Western Roman Empire. 
Part II. — Calendar of the Rise, Course, Decline, and Fall of the Papal 
and Mohammedan Powers .... . p. 509 

APPENDIX B p. 673 

APPENDIX C p. 692 



CONTENTS OF APPENDICES. 



APPENDIX A. 

PAGB 

1. Levitical chronology soli-lunar ....*«» . , 509 

II. Typical feasts regulated by lunations ..„.*„,, 509 

III. Closeness of the adjustment „„,.,., 509 

IV. Remarkable adjustment in the jubilee — the 600 lunations . . 510 

V. Important analogous adjustment in the " seventy weeks " — the 
6000 lunations, or the correspondence between the time of 
our Lord's death in the " seventy weeks," and that of the 
day of atonement and liberation in the jubilee 511 

VI. The grounds of the chronology here followed 513 

1. As to the terminal point from which the "seventy weeks " 

are to be reckoned 513 

2. The three eclipses recorded by Ptolemy in the reigns of 

Carabyses and Darius 516 

3. The historic interval occupied by our Lord's life. Lind- 

say : Chrono-astrolabe 517 

4. The date of the nativity. The eclipse which preceded the 

death of Herod ' 519 

5. Kepler's calculations as to the star of the nativity, and the 

year B.C. 6, and Alford's comments 520 

6. Alford on the date given in the Gospel of Luke for the 

ministry of John 522 

7. The date of our Lord's passion 523 

8. Conclusiens as to the dates in the " seventy weeks " of our 

Lord's death, resurrection, and ascension 524 

VII. The duration of our Lord's terrestrial life, and its agreement 
with the 33 years 7 months and 7 days soli-lunar cycle in 
which the sun gains on the moon one solar year .... 523 



xxx CONTENTS. 



PAGtt 

VIII. Confirmation of the chronology thus unfolded 530 

1. As to the date of the 1st of Nisan, B.C. 457. Evidence 

afforded by the 2300 y. cycle 530 

2. The " seventy weeks " as reckoned from this date with 

sabbatical years. Table of sabbatic years in the 

" seventy weeks " 530 

3. That the last 70 years in the 490 commenced with Herod's 

capture of Jerusalem 532 

4. Termination of the 2300 years sanctuary cycle as reckoned 

from B. C. 457 in the 1260th year of the Mohammedan era. 
Mohammedan calendar for 18 79 532 

5. The twelve jubilees extending from the end of the "seventy 

weeks," in A.D. 34, to the commencement of Mohamme- 
dan reckoning, a. d. 622 534 

6. Objection to the 1st Nisan, B.C. 458, as the commencement 

of the " seventy weeks " on the ground that it coincided 
with the Jewish sabbath 534 

7. Answer to the objection that the passover moon of March 

18, A.D. 29, preceded the equinox 534 

8. Coincidence of the commencement of the " seventy weeks," 

March 20-21, B.C. 457, with the vernal equinox . . 535 

9. Harmony of the day of Ezra's reaching Jerusalem, first 

day of the fifth month, July 16, B.C. 457, with an im- 
portant series of dates connected with the calamities and 
deliverances of Jerusalem and the Jewish people . . . 536 

10. Coincidence of the termination of the 2300 years cycle as 

reckoned from B.C. 457, with the termination of the 391 
years predicted duration of the Ottoman " woe "... 540 

11. Convergence of 2300 solar years from B.C. 457 and 2520 

lunar years from the Babylonian subversion of the throne 
of David, B.C. 602, and bi-section of the latter period by 
the Hegira date, a.d. 622 540 

12. Analogous 1260 lunar years, extending from the destruction 

of the city and temple by Nebuchadnezzar, B.C. 587, to 

the capture of Jerusalem by Omar, a.d. 637 .... 542 

13. 630 years cycle, one quarter of " seven times," extending 



CONTENTS. xxxi 



PAGB 

from the Babylonian commencement of the "times of 
the Gentiles," B.C. 602, to the year of the supreme pass- 
over, a.d. 29 544 

14. Remarkable harmony of this chronology with that of the 
four empires and " times of the Gentiles " as reckoned 
from the era of Nabonassar, B.C. 747 545 

IX. Important 1078 years cycle, harmonizing the year, month, 

and jubilee . . 546 

X. The cycle of the precession of the equinoxes 550 

XL Cycle of the revolution of the solar perigee 559 

XII. Cycle of the variation in the length of the seasons .... 560 

XIII. Cycle of the excentricity of the earth's orbit ^5 

XIV. That the proportion which solar revolutions bear to lunar, and 

diurnal to annual, is octave, or jubilaic . « 566 

XV. Growth of the epact traced from its lowest cycles to its de- 
velopment m the prophetic times 571 

XVI. Calendar of the "times of the Gentiles" 580 

Part I. Calendar of the four great empires from the era of 
Nabonassar, — the beginning of the kingdom of 
Babylon, to the fall of the western Roman empire 583 

PART II. Calendar of the rise, course, decline, and fall of 

the Papal and Mohammedan powers 607 

Supplementary Notes , <, . ............. 673 

APPENDIX B. 

List of authors consulted in the preparation of this work . . 6S3 

APPENDIX C. 

East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions . . . 702 



" Tlie natural and mora! constitution and government of the world are 
so connected, as to make up together but one scheme : and it is highly 
probable, that the first is formed and carried on merely in subserviency to 
the latter ; as the vegetable world is for the animal, and organized bodies 
for minds. But the thing intended here, is, without inquiring how far the 
administration of the natural world is subordinate to that of the moral, 
only to observe the credibility, that one should be analogous or similar to 
the other ; that therefore every act of Divine justice and goodness, may be 
supposed to look much beyond itself, and its immediate object ; may have 
some reference to other parts of God's moral administration, and to a 
general moral plan : and that every circumstance of this his moral govern- 
ment, may be adjusted beforehand with a view to the whole of it. Thus 
for example : the determined length of time, and the degrees and ways, in 
which virtue is to remain in a state of warfare and discipline, and in which 
wickedness is permitted to have its progress ; the times appointed for the 
execution of justice ; the appointed instruments of it ; the kind of rewards 
and punishments, and the manners of their distribution ; all particular 
instances of Divine justice and goodness, and every circumstance of them, 
may have such respects to each other, as to make up all together, a whole, 
connected and related in all its parts : a scheme or system, which is as 
properly one as the natural world is, and of the like kind." 

Bp. Butler. 



PART I. 

PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



CHAPTER I. 

god's revelation of himself to man has been a pro- 
gressive ONE. TRUTH IN GENERAL HAS BEEN REVEALED 

PROGRESSIVELY. — PROPHECY, THE DIVINE HISTORY OF THE 
FUTURE, CONSISTS OF A SERIES OF PROGRESSIVE REVELA- 
TIONS. — PRACTICAL RESULTS OF THE COMPREHENSION AND 
APPLICATION OF THIS PRINCIPLE. 

GOD has been pleased to make three great revelations 
of Himself to man : his Works ; his Word ; and his 
Son, and these revelations have been progressive in character. 
Nature, the Law, the Gospel; a silent material universe, an 
inspired Book, a living God-man; these are the three great 
steps that have led from the death and darkness of sin to that 
knowledge of the true God which is eternal life. 

A fourth revelation of God, fuller and more perfect than 
any, is yet to come. The only begotten Son, who is in the 
bosom of the Father, who is the brightness of his glory and 
the express image of his person, who " declared Him n 
when He came the first time in grace and humiliation, will de- 
clare Him yet more fully when He comes a second time in 
righteousness and in glory. Then the earth will be filled with 
the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea. 

Each of these revelations is in itself progressive. The earth 
and all that is therein, attained perfection by six distinct stages, 

B 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



during the six days of creation. The angels followed with 
adoring wonder the fresh unfoldings of Divine wisdom, good- 
ness, and power, presented in the gradual formation of this 
great globe, and in its myriad mysteries of vegetable and ani- 
mal life, though to human eyes nature was presented perfect 
and complete. But human eyes could see at first the surface 
of things alone ; every advance in true science, enabling men 
to penetrate more deeply into the hidden wisdom of the work 
of God, has been a progressive revelation. And we have only 
begun, even now, to understand the glory of God, manifested in 
ehe universe. To us, more than to our ancestors, the heavens 
declare the glory of God, and the earth showeth his handi- 
work ; and to our children they will do so even more. 

The Word of God is also a progressive revelation, and so 
has been the Providence recorded in that Word. 

The Bible is composed of sixty-three separate books, written 
by forty various authors, during a period of 1600 years. The 
sacred writings develop a revelation which was continually 
unfolding itself through all those years ; and close with a book 
bearing the divinely given title of " The Revelation of Jesus 
Christ." 

The third revelation of God, that afforded by the person 
and work of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ, was also progres- 
sive. The mere fact of his birth and existence in the midst 
of a world of sinners, was in itself an evidence of God's love to 
a guilty race. Each word He spoke, each act He performed, 
each day He lived, unfolded more and more of God. They 
who saw Him saw the Father, for He was his express image ; 
and not until He, the Maker and Judge of all, was exposed on 
the cursed tree, not till from his riven side flowed the water 
and the blood, not till He bowed his head and gave up the 
ghost, never till then, was the heart of God fully unveiled : 
' ' hereby perceive we the love of God." 

And it will be the same in the future ; for since finite man 
is destined through boundless mercy to an eternal advance in 
the knowledge of the infinite God, that knowledge must needs 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



be vouchsafed in progressive revelations, adapted to man's 
ability to receive them. And herein will lie one of the joys of 
heaven, to be ever learning more of Him, who is the Truth, and 
from Him, of all things. 

No student of Scripture can fail to be struck with the pro- 
gressive character of its teachings. On no one subject was full 
information given at the beginning • all was revealed in germ 
only, and in the lapse of ages unfolded by degrees. Take, for 
instance, the doctrine of the Trinity : in the beginning God 
taught the unity of his nature, and the other truth that in the 
one God there are three persons, was only intimated ; suggested 
by certain forms of expression, as the use of a plural noun with 
a singular verb, which occurs several hundred times, as in 
Gen. i. i, Ps. lviii. n. There were besides expressions, the 
accurate harmony of which with this truth, we who understand 
it can appreciate, but which were not revelations to those who 
were ignorant of it. Such for example is the divinely pre- 
scribed threefold form of benediction in Numbers ; and such 
the seraphs' threefold ascription of praise in Isaiah, followed by 
the Lord Jehovah's question, " Who will go for us ? " The later 
prophets assume the doctrine as true (Isa. xlviii. 16, Isa. ix. 6); 
but the New Testament alone reveals it fully. 

Or take again the law of love ; man's first duty towards his 
brother man. To the antediluvian world no law on the subject 
was given. To Noah, murder, the worst expression of hatred, 
was forbidden ; through Moses the doing of any ill to the 
neighbour was prohibited, either in his person, his property, his 
reputation or his domestic interests. By the Lord Jesus the 
feeling of any enmity was forbidden ; and not only so but posi- 
tive love, even to the laying down of life itself for the brother, 
commanded. What an advance is the conception of love em- 
bodied in i Corinthians xiii. on that derived from Sinai, or even 
from the sermon on the mount. 

Our present object is t ) trace this progress in connection 
with the prophecies of Scripture, and more especially with those 
of the New Testament. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



I. The prophetic teachings of Scripture consist of a series of 

progressive revelations. 

Its earliest predictions of any future event, have the character 
of outlines, later ones fill in the sketch, and the final ones 
present the finished picture. It is first the bud, next the half 
opened blossom, and lastly the flower in full bloom. 

There was progress in the amount of truth revealed, as well 
as in the fulness of revelation on each point. The little stream- 
let of prophecy which sprang up in Eden and trickled down 
through the antediluvian ages, swelled by continual accessions, 
till it rushed a flowing Jordan through Israel's tribes, grew into 
a mighty Euphrates during the Babylonish captivity, and opened 
out into a vast delta around Patmos, whence its waters glide 
calmly into the ocean of eternity. 

Adam heard one brief enigmatical prediction from the voice o£ 
God Himself. Noah sketched, in three inspired sentences, the 
great features of human history. In the curse on Canaan was 
contained in embryo the iniquity of the seven nations and their 
conquest by Joshua ; the priority of blessing granted to Shem, 
similarly contained the subsequent choice of his descendant 
Abraham to be the heir of the world and father of the faithful. 
In the promise of enlargement given to Japheth, was contained 
the spiritual enlargement which took place when the Gentiles 
were received into the new covenant, and the physical en- 
largement accomplished in comparatively recent days by the 
European colonization of America, and conquest of India, both 
" tents of Shem." This prophecy spanned the stream of time 
with a few gigantic arches ; carrying us over from the vineyard 
of Noah to the Anglo-Saxon empires of our own day. 

The patriarchs learned from God many additional particulars 
as to the future : to Abraham was revealed the history of the 
descendants of his two sons, Ishmael and Isaac ; the four hun- 
dred years' affliction of his posterity ; the blessing of all nations 
through his seed, etc. Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, all saw 
Christ's day and were glad ; Isaiah and Jeremiah revealed not 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



only the proximate judgments and deliverances of Israel, but 
also incarnation and atonement. The visions of Daniel pre- 
sent not only a comprehensive but an orderly and conse- 
cutive prophetic narrative, of leading events, from his own day 
to the end of all things, a miniature universal history. The 
fall of Belshazzar ; the rise of Cyrus, his conquests, the great- 
ness of his empire; his successors, Cambyses, Smerdis, and 
Darius ; the character, power, and conduct of Xerxes ; the 
marvellous exploits of Alexander the Great, his sudden death, 
and the division of his empire ; the reigns of the Ptolemies 
and Seleucidae; the character and conquests of the Roman 
empire ; the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus ; the decay and 
division of the Roman empire ; the rise of the Papacy and its 
career ; its cruel persecutions of God's saints : all this and 
much more is foretold by the man greatly beloved. 

The " burdens " of the later prophets concern Syria, Egypt, 
Edom, Tyre, Sidon, Moab, Philistia, Kedar, Elam, Babylon, Gog 
and Magog, besides Judah and Ephraim. Enoch's prophecy is 
comprised in one verse, and touches only one theme. Isaiah's 
has sixty-six chapters, and touches on an immense variety of 
topics. From our Lord and his apostles flowed additional 
revelations, which opened up subjects previously veiled in mys- 
tery, and cast a flood of light on every important feature of 
the present and of the future. Thus the volume of prophecy 
grew in bulk and in scope, with the ever increasing number 
of individuals and of nations, and with the consequent com- 
plexity and importance of the events to be announced by 
inspiration. 

Further, the prophecies of any one event have also a distinctly 
progressive character; they increase both in fulness and in 
clearness as the period of fulfilment approaches. A guide, 
conducting a traveller to Chamoumx, before starting from 
Geneva points out the glittering white mountain on the 
horizon as the goal of the day's journey, and adds a few 
general indications of the route. When the city and its 
suburbs are left behind the guide ceases perhaps to speak 



6 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

much of Mont Blanc, tells rather of the height of the Saleve 
round which the road winds ; from some eminence he points 
out the towns and villages which dot the widespread plain 
beyond, and which must presently be passed; traces the 
windings of the Arve, speaks of Bonneville and Sallenches 
as marking stages of the journey, but allows the magnifi- 
cent terminus of their wanderings to occupy for the time 
a comparatively secondary place, minor but nearer objects 
taking up his attention. At a later period of the day, when 
the glorious vision of the ever nearing mountain breaks afresh 
upon the traveller at Sallenches, the guide pours forth clear 
and copious descriptions of its various parts ; other things 
are forgotten now, they press on; again the nearer hills 
shut out the mountain summit, but the guide tells how each 
turn of the last picturesque and winding valley will reveal 
some new view of it. When it reappears the traveller is 
startled by the nearer magnificence of the monarch of the 
Alps, it rivets his eye, it absorbs his attention ; the guide enters 
into minute particulars, describes the different " aiguilles " 
and summits of the mountain, so that as he approaches them 
one by one, the traveller recognises them. And now Cha- 
mounix and the glaciers come in sight, and the traveller finds 
as might have been expected, that what appeared, when fifty 
miles off, a simple outline of uniform white, breaks up into a 
series of jagged- peaks, with awful shadows and frozen seas 
lying in deep valleys between ; that the one mountain is in re- 
ality half a dozen, and that what appeared at a distance merely 
a feature of the wide horizon, has developed into a vast and 
intricate region, in which he may wander for weeks without 
exploring it all. Yet, as he gazes up at the great summit, he 
realizes, that it is the very same mountain he first beheld from 
Geneva. , 

Thus, from the fall onwards, the triumphs of the Cross have 
been the great theme of prophecy. Even in Eden the main 
character and grand result of human history were foretold. 
Enmity was to subsist between Satan and men, with all its fruits 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



of conflict and suffering ; ultimately, the serpent's head was to 
be bruised, the author of evil destroyed, but the victory was to 
be dearly bought, for the woman's seed by whom it should be 
gained, should have his heel bruised in the battle. Here is the 
Bible in embryo, the sum of all history and prophecy in a germ. 
But what a mysterious enigma it was, what a slight shadowy 
outline, what a vague though blessed prospect ! Still it was a 
light shining in a dark place ; its beams were feeble, but to the 
eye of faith it was the one glimmer that irradiated the intense 
gloom of the future. But what desires it must have left un- 
satisfied, what questions unanswered ! How long was this sore 
conflict to last ? By what means were the vanquished to be- 
come, the victors ? Little could Adam and Eve know on these 
points ; the one bright hope, like a glittering mountain top, 
defined their horizon ; its form was rendered indistinct by the 
mists of ignorance ; but it riveted their gaze, for the rest of 
that horizon was blank, and nought but travail and sorrow and 
labour in an accursed earth, lay between them and this hope. 

To the view of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, this sin- 
gle future became dual. This first prophet, announced not 
only blessing, but judgment to come. He saw mankind divided 
into two classes, the saints and the ungodly (Jude 14) ; and 
he foretold a coming of the Lord with the former to execute 
judgment on the latter. Here was an advance : the previously 
revealed conflict reappears, and the previously revealed victory ; 
but there shine out the additional truths that the conflict would 
not be between man and Satan alone, but between men and 
God, and that its termination would be effected only, by a 
coming of the Lord Himself to earth. In the sanctifying 
power of this truth Enoch walked in holy separation from the 
ungodly, and in holy fellowship with God, for three hundred 
years, and " before his translation he had this testimony that 
he pleased God." 

To the patriarchs it was revealed that in their line should 
arise the promised Seed of the woman, in whom all the 
families of the earth should be blessed. Jacob's dying 
prophecy designated the' very tribe in which He should 



8 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION 



appear, and threw some light on his character and work. To 
Moses it was made known that the promised Deliverer should 
be a prophet, and David foretold that He should be a king and 
the manner of his kingdom (Psalm lxxii.). The promise of his 
coming grew continually brighter and clearer • but as yet it ap- 
peared only one, a glorious advent of a royal and triumphant 
Deliverer. What the bruising of the heel should be, was still 
hidden in obscurity : the double nature of Christ, his true 
character and work, his rejection, suffering and death, had 
not yet been predicted ; they had been shadowed forth, it is 
true, in typical actions and ordinances ; but these were not 
understood even by the actors in them. 

In a wondrous historic prefiguration Abraham and Isaac, all 
unconsciously to themselves, had symbolised the great truth that 
the Father would give the Son to be the sacrifice ; not know- 
ing what he said, Isaac uttered the great question of all ages : 
" Behold the fire and the wood ; but where is the Lamb for the 
burnt offering ? " and Abraham gave the prophetic reply : " My 
son, God will provide Himself a Lamb." But types like this, 
and like that of Joseph's rejection by his brethren, and exalta- 
tion to Egypt's throne, were not revelations to the then exist- 
ing generations of men, although we in the light of the antitype 
can see them to have had a hidden meaning. Nor was the 
paschal lamb in Egypt, nor the complex system of sacrifices 
inaugurated by Moses, any revelation of the victim character of 
Christ. David in the Psalms wrote of his sufferings as well as 
his glories, but so little were these passages understood, that 
our Lord and his apostles had to expound them even in their 
day. 

But when David had fallen asleep, and Solomon's typical 
reign was over, when declension and decay set in, and Israel's 
kingdom was on the wane, when a dark night of captivity 
and dispersion was approaching, then revelations multiplied. 
The star that had so long shone in the prophetic heaven, 
and been regarded as one round orb, was seen to be a binary 
star. The objects and results of the first coming of Christ 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



were announced, in such a way as to distinguish it from his 
second coming, yet not so clearly but that difficulties still 
left room for misconception. Many particulars and details 
were also added ; He was to spring out of the stem of Jesse, to 
be a virgin's son, and to bear the name Emmanuel ; his name 
moreover was to be called The Mighty God, the Everlasting 
Father, the Prince of Peace ; and there was to be no end of the 
increase of his government. The charactei of his kingdom 
was more fully described, and the fact revealed, that Gentiles as 
well as Jews, should share in its blessings. And strange new 
strains began to mingle in the music of the prophetic harp as 
Isaiah touched its strings, mournful tones which told of suffer- 
ing and rejection, of oppression and bruises and wounds, to be 
inflicted on the coming One. He was to be a holy sinbearer, 
a silent sufferer, a slaughtered lamb ; He was to pour out his 
soul unto death ; He was to have a grave ; He was to be a sub- 
stitute, a sin offering, an intercessor ; and only through experi- 
ences such as these to be " satisfied " and exalted, " and divide 
the spoil with the great." And Daniel, in full harmony, an 
nounced that Messiah should be cut off but not for Himself, and 
that his coming instead of bringing rest and glory to Israel, 
would be followed by trouble, war, and desolation. By degrees 
it thus became evident, that a long stretch of previously con- 
cealed valley, lay between the double summit of the mighty 
mountain, the hope of the coming and kingdom of Christ. 
Micah foretold that He should come out of Bethlehem, 
Zechariah that his feet should stand on the mount of Olives ; 
but who suspecte.d that at least 1800 years were to elapse be- 
tween the two events ? The exact period when He should 
come and be cut off was foretold, though in symbolic style ; and 
in the same style, a glimpse was given of the interval to elapse, 
before He came again to be " King over all the earth." Vast 
progress had been made when Malachi, closing the volume of 
Old Testament prophecy, spoke of the Lord coming suddenly 
to his temple, and the Sun of righteousness rising with healing 
in his wings. How amazingly more full and correct were the 



io PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

anticipations of Simeon and Anna than those of Adam and 
Eve ! The earlier saints could only cast a wondering gaze 
abroad over the earth, and up and down through unknown 
ages ; the later — knew the country, the city, the very build- 
ing in which, and the very date at which, the Consolation 
ol Israel should appear ; and when at last the aged saint held 
in his arms the long promised woman's Seed, he spoke of 
salvation, and of peace in believing, and of a sword that must 
pierce the heart of the virgin mother, proving that the mys- 
tery of the bruised heel was no dark one to his heart. But 
yet the consummation was not come, the serpent's head was 
all unbruised, his power seemed mightier than ever. The goal 
receded as it was approached; the kingdom of Christ was 
come, but it was only in a mystery. Once more the light of 
prophecy streams forth, the interval is filled in with copious 
details by our Lord and his apostles. The King is to go into 
a far country and to return ; the mystery not made known in 
other ages is revealed by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be 
fellow-heirs and partakers in the promises ; multitudinous fea- 
tures of the future are delineated by the pen of inspiration ; but 
the one grand old hope, the coming of Jesus Christ to rule, and 
reign, and judge, and destroy the devil and his works, still rises 
paramount to all the rest. Finally, in the Apocalypse the last 
stretch of country is laid ope*n to view, each milestone of this 
closing stage of the journey may be as it were distinguished 
and counted, the mists have cleared away, the intervening hills 
and valleys have taken their proper places, and as each rapid 
revolution of our globe brings us almost consciously nearer to 
" that blessed hope," we gaze with ever growing admiration at 
its vastness, at its glories, at its unutterable height, at its awful 
shadows \ until as we see the old serpent, and death and hades, 
cast for ever into the lake of fire, and the New Jerusalem 
descend out of heaven, that the tabernacle of God may be ever- 
more with men, we exclaim : " It is done ; the woman's seed 
hath bruised the serpent's head !" 

Thus again, the prophecies respecting the resurrection of 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. u 

the dead, and the future judgment, are few and dark in the 
Old Testament. Job anticipated resurrection personally, and 
Daniel speaks of a resurrection of part of the dead. But we 
have only to contrast these and similar hints, with the clear and 
copious predictions of i Corinthians xv. and i Thessalonians iv., 
in order to be convinced of the progressive character of revela- 
tion on this subject. It is Christ who has brought life and im- 
mortality to light through the gospel. 

Thus again, the past and future restorations of Israel, so often 
blended in one prophecy in the Old Testament, are broadly 
distinguished in the New, and the hidden mystery of the call- 
ing of the Gentiles is interposed between them. Compare for 
instance Jeremiah xxx., xxxi., with Romans xi. : " the mystery 
of Christ ... in other ages was not made known unto 
the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles 
and prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be fellow- 
heirs, and of the same body, and partakers of his promise in 
Christ by the gospel " (Eph. iii. 3-7). These words are an em- 
phatic assertion of the principle of progressive revelation in 
prophecy. 

II. The prophecies of the New Testament have this progressive r 
character, and divide themselves into five series of predictions, each 
series in the succession, being in advance of the preceding one. 
There are : 

1. The prophecies annunciatory of Christ, by the angels, by 
Zacharias, by Mary, by Elizabeth, by Simeon, and by John the 
Baptist. 

2. The earlier prophecies of Christ Himself on earth. 

3. The later prophecies of Christ : Matthew xxii. — xxv., 
Mark xiii., Luke xxi., John xiv. — xvi. 

4. The prophetic teachings of the Holy Ghost through the 
apostles, contained in the Acts and in the epistles. 

5. The Apocalypse, or final revelation of Christ from heaven: 
" the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to Him, to 
show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to 
pass." 



12 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

The first series declared in general the character of Christ's 
person and the grand objects and results of his mission ; but 
they are silent as to all else. 

The second series, or early prophecies of Christ Himself, in 
Matthew vii. and xiii., Mark iv., reveal the mysteries of the 
kingdom of heaven, its foundation and gradual development, its 
twofold character and its final issues. That this was an ad- 
vance on all previous revelations may be gathered from the 
words of our Lord in Matthew xiii. : " Blessed are your ears, 
for they hear ; for verily I say unto you that many prophets 
and righteous men have desired to hear those things which 
ye hear, and have not heard them" 

The later prophecies of our Lord on earth, consist almost 
entirely of new revelations. These embrace, the rejection of the 
Jews on account of their unbelief, the destruction of their city 
and temple, their dispersion among all nations, the treading 
down of Jerusalem by the Gentiles, the persecution of the 
Christian church, the world wide preaching of the gospel, and 
his own second coming, with the signs and events atend- 
ing it ; also his own approaching sufferings and departure to 
the Father, and his return to receive his people to Himself, 
with the coming and mission of the Holy Ghost during the 
interval of his absence. Much as all this was in advance of 
the Lord's previous prophecies, He added, after making these 
revelations : " I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye 
cannot bear them now; howbeit, when He the Spirit of truth 
is come, He will guide you into all truth ; and He will show 
you things to come." After all therefore that had been re- 
vealed concerning the future, very much still remained to be 
made known, and was to be made known by the teaching of 
the Holy Ghost. 

Here is another distinct announcement of the principle of 
progressive revelation in prophecy. 

With the expectations thus awakened we glance next at 

The prophetic teachings of the Holy Ghost through the apostles. 
Examining the epistles in their chronological order, we find the 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 13 

two earliest, those to the church at Thessalonica, filled with 
the subject of the Lord's second coming and revealing much 
fresh truth in connection with it. It is to be accompanied by 
the transformation of living saints, the resurrection of dead 
saints, and their joint rapture to meet the Lord in the air ; the 
manner of his return, and (negatively) the time of it, are an- 
nounced. Copious and detailed descriptions of the apostasy 
to be developed in the Christian church are given, as also the 
history of the man of sin, in whose career that apostasy was 
to culminate ; his Satanic origin, his lying wonders and 
unrighteous deceptions, his consumption by the spirit of the 
Lord's mouth, and his destruction by the brightness of his 
coming, are all foretold for the first time. 

One or two years later, Paul wrote his first letter to the 
Corinthian church, in which revelations are made fuller than 
any previous ones, on the subject of resurrection ; its principles, 
its manner, the nature of the bodies in which the saints will 
rise, the instantaneous transformation of the living to be 
effected at the sounding of the last trumpet, all these were 
newly revealed features. " Behold, I show you a mystery : 
we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a 
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." 

But, more important still, the order of this resurrection of 
the saints with respect to other events is mentioned : " Christ 
the firstfruits, afterward they that are Christ's at his coming. 
Then cometh the end." The resurrection of saints was to be 
subsequent to Christ's resurrection, prior to the end ; but how 
long subsequent to the one, or how long prior to the other, is 
not here revealed. 

About a year after, in his epistle to the Romans, the apostle 
clears up the mystery of Israel's future, and answers the ques- 
tions whether God had cast off his ancient people, whether 
they had stumbled that they should fall. He reveals that their 
judicial rejection was but for a time ; that it should terminate 
when the fulness of the Gentiles was brought in ; and that then 
all Israel should be saved, and the Deliverer return to Zion 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



He thus " vindicates the ways of God to man," and shows that 
\iis gifts and calling, are without repentance. 

Peter wrote his first epistle about ten years later ; but though 
he speaks of the revelation of Jesus Christ, and the appearing 
of the Chief Shepherd, he added little to the sum of what was 
already known on these topics. But in his second epistle, 
written about the year 68, he unfolds the final doom of the 
heavens and the earth that are now ; that they are to be burned 
up, the elements to melt with fervent heat and to be succeeded 
by a new heaven and a new earth wherein righteousness should 
dwell. He mentions also some particulars of the approaching 
apostasy, a subject on which Paul in his two letters to 
Timothy dwells more fully. Both apostles paint a dark pic- 
ture of the " last days ; " foretell scoffers, apostates, hypocrites, 
false teachers seduced by evil spirits to teach doctrines of 
devils, a form of godliness without power ; and they speak also 
of their own near departure. 

Then finally, thirty years later than the writings of the other 
apostles, and closing the inspired volume commenced by 
Moses 1600 years before, we find the revelation made by Christ 
in glory to John. It is the latest gift of a glorified Saviour to 
his suffering church, and is entirely different in manner, scope, 
and style from all that precedes it. It is all but wholly devoted 
to prophetic truth ; ifr contains a full and orderly prophecy of 
the events that were to transpire to the end of time ; it unveils 
new scenes, and its dark sayings are full of glorious light. It 
is evident that the prophetic matter of this book, was unrevealed 
previous to the death and crucifixion of Christ ; for it is repre- 
sented as contained in a seven-sealed book, written within and 
on the back side. A strong angel cries with a loud voice, 
' Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seven seals 
thereof?" and none is found worthy save the "Lamb as it had 
been slain" who is in the midst of the throne. He comes and 
takes the book out of the right hand of Him that sits on the 
throne, and He o_pe?is its seven seals. 

The descriptions contained in this book of the sufferings ot 



PROGRESSIVE RE VELA TION. 1 5 

the faithful church under persecution • of the sins of Babylon 
the great ; of the judgment to be poured upon it ; of the ad- 
vent of Christ and of the first resurrection ; of the millennial 
reign of Christ (barely mentioned elsewhere in the New Testa- 
ment) ; of the universal revolt at its close ; of the judgments 
which follow j of the New Jerusalem ; of the new heavens and 
the new earth ; and of the eternal state — have no parallel in the 
whole compass of Scripture. 

Being written subsequently to the destruction of Jerusalem 
and the dispersion of the Jews, the Apocalypse omits reference 
to these events treated by earlier prophecies; and, being 
addressed to the Christian church, it omits much found else- 
where, that is exclusively Jewish. But as regards all that was 
future to it, and of importance to the church of God, it pre- 
sents a consecutive series of visions, combining and connecting 
the separate revelations previously made, and adding much 
never before revealed. 

III. From these facts the following inferences may be de 
duced. 

1. God does not reveal all the future at any one time, but 
gradually, as the knowledge of it may be needed and can be 
received. 

2. We must not expect earlier prophecies to be equally 
comprehensive with later ones, nor endeavour to construct 
from the gospels and epistles alone, the perfect map of coming 
events. By its position as the last and fullest prophecy of the 
Bible, the Apocalypse is in advance of all other revelations, 
and a correct knowledge of the future is impossible apart from 
the study of it. No difficulties therefore, arising from its 
symbolic style or apparent obscurity, should lead us to dispense 
with its teachings. The testimony of later prophecies should 
never be in the slightest degree distorted, nor anything sub- 
tracted from their fulness, in order to bring them into harmony 
with earlier ones ; but, on the contrary, their copious details 
and more comprehensive teachings, must be added to all pre- 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



vious revelations, and then allowed to modify the impressions 
we have received from earlier and more elementary predictions. 

3. We must not therefore reject any particular prophetic 
truth because it is found " only in Revelation," but receive the 
teachings of this final prophecy on its inspired authority alone, 
when they are unconfirmed by other Scripture. 

4. The Apocalypse being written for the church militant, 
for the dispensation to w T hich we belong, and the days in which 
we live, is indispensable to the man of God who would now 
be thoroughly furnished to all good works. No portion of it 
should be considered as unimportant, or treated as superfluous. 
" Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the words of 
this prophecy, and keep those things that are written therein, 
for the time is at hand." " If any man shall add unto these 
things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in 
this book j and if any man shall take away from the words of the 
book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the 
book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the' things that 
are -written in this book" (chap. xxii. 18, 19). 

5. The Apocalypse, as a precious and principal light, shining 
in a dark place, until the day dawn and the Day Star arise, 
should be allowed to cast its rich and final rays back over all 
the prophecies on the subjects of which it treats, in the volume 
which it closes ; and its consecutive visions should be employed 
to bind together in their proper order, the separate links of such 
earlier predictions. 



CHAPTER II. 

PROGRESSIVE REVELATIONS AS TO THE RELATIVE PERIOD OP 
THE SECOND ADVENT OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. 

IN the light of this principle of Progressive Revelation, let 
us now consider the most interesting and momentous 
question in connection with the future, the relative period of 
the return of our blessed Lord and Master. 

Before examining the revelations of the Apocalypse on this 
subject, we will briefly glance at the general testimony of Scrip- 
ture with respect to it ; first that of the Old Testament, and 
then that of the New. 

It is impossible that those who " love his appearing " should 
be indifferent as to the season of their Lord's return. Even the 
prophets searched diligently what manner of time the Spirit of 
Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified before- 
hand, the sufferings of Christ and the glories that should follow. 
With much more reason, we, who in his sufferings see our 
salvation, and in his glory our own eternal portion, we, who are 
espoused as a chaste virgin to Christ, and have his parting 
promise, " I will come again and receive you to Myself," may 
inquire diligently, and long to know, when we may hope to see 
Him as He is, and be for ever with our Lord. The more we 
long for an event itself, the more anxious we are to ascertain 
the probable period or its occurrence. It argues little love 
to the Lord if we do not ardently desire his return ; and it 
argues little desire for his return, if we never search the 
Scriptures, prayerfully seeking to learn from them when we 
may expect it. It is true we are to let patience have her 
perfect work; but our patience should be "the patience of 
hope," not the patience of careless indifference ; and hope will 
always suggest the inquiry, how long ? 

c 



1 3 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

"How long, O Lord our Saviour, wilt Thou remain away? 
Our hearts are growing weary, that Thou dost absent stay. 
Oh when shall come the moment, when, brighter far than morn s 
The sunshine of Thy glory, shall on Thy people dawn?" 

It is true that ever since apostolic days it has been the 
bounden duty of the church to be ever watchful, ever waiting, 
for the return of God's Son from heaven. The teaching of 
Christ Himself and of his apostles, led the early generations of 
Christians in a very real sense, to expect the speedy return of 
their Lord. They took his promise " Lo, I come quickly," to 
mean quickly according to human calculations ; we have learned 
by experience that it meant " quickly," counting a thousand 
years as one day ; and unless we have something more explicit 
than this by which to shape our expectations, we, Christians of 
the nineteenth century, would have little indeed to sustain our 
hope. A promise which has already extended over 1800 years 
might well extend over 1800 more, and the epiphany for which 
we wait be still ages distant. 

But Scripture contains more than general promises on this 
subject j it contains many specific, orderly, and even chrono- 
logical prophecies. We have full and explicit inspired predictions 
by which to shape our expectations, and these numerous and 
detailed prophetic statements, do not leave us like shipwrecked 
sailors on a dark night, on a wild and stormy sea, deprived of 
chart and compass and ignorant of their bearings. If we will 
use them aright, they place us rather in the position of a weary 
crew, at the end of a long and dangerous voyage, exploring by 
the morning twilight, the chart on which their track has been 
marked down, noting the thousands of miles they have sailed, 
recognising each high land and island they have passed on their 
course, and all the lights and beacons long since left behind, 
cheering each other as they observe that the faithful chart, 
whose accuracy their long experience has demonstrated, shows 
out two or three waymarks ahead, — waymarks absolutely coming 
into sight, — and rejoicing in hope of a speedy entrance into 
a peaceful port. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 19 

But here we are met with an objection. Those who search 
and study the prophetic word are often rebuked by the quota- 
tion, " of that day and that hour knowetb no man." Now 
though some students of prophecy have degenerated into pro- 
phets, and have required to be reminded of these words, yet it 
is a mistake to suppose that they forbid investigation, or render 
hopeless beforehand, any well grounded and intelligent conclu- 
sions, as to the period of our Lord's return. The day and the 
hour of this great event have not assuredly been revealed, but 
its place on the general chart of human history, has as certainly 
not been concealed. 

The analogy of the Old Testament would lead us to expect 
that dates would be given by which some approximation to 
a knowledge of the period of Christ's second coming, might, 
towards the close of the dispensation, be made. For however 
dark earlier generations of Israel may have been, as to the time 
of his first coming, those who lived during the five centuries 
immediately preceding it, had the light of distinct chronologi- 
cal prophecy, to sustain their hopes, and guide their expecta- 
tions. Though Daniel's prediction of the " seventy weeks " was 
expressed in symbolic language, and perhaps not understood 
by the generation to whom it was first given, yet as a matter of 
history, we know that it was correctly interpreted by later gone- 
rations, that it formed a national opinion as to the probably 
period of the appearance of Messiah the Prince, and that it 
taught the faithful, like Simeon and Anna, to be waiting for the 
consolation of Israel. Is it not likely that the later generations 
of the Christian church, which is indwelt by the Spirit of truth 9 
of whom Christ expressly said " He shall show you things to 
come" should have as clear or clearer light, as to the period of 
the second advent ? — light, not as to its day or hour, not as to 
its month or year, but as to its period, and especially as to its 
chronological relation, to other future events. From the fact 
that the Lord Jesus, as the New Testament abundantly proves, 
wished his disciples in all ages to be kept constant in love, 
and vigilant in holiness, by means of the continual expectation 



20 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

of his return, we may be sure beforehand, that the period of that 
event, will not be clearly revealed in plain words, either in the 
Old Testament or the New. Any revelation on the subject, 
will be sure to be characterized, by a marked and intentional 
obscurity, and to be of such a character as that only " the wise 
shall understand" it. On the other hand, as the second advent 
must bear to other great future events, the relation either ot 
antecedent or subsequent, (even if not of cause or of effect,) 
its position relatively to them, must be more or less clearly 
indicated. 

For if there exist in Scripture, an orderly chronological pro- 
phecy of future events, containing a prediction of the second 
coming of Christ, as one link in the chain, its place, in reference 
to all the other events, must of course be clear. And if such a 
prophecy contain no direct mention of the second advent, yet 
if it contain a mention of events, which, from other scriptures we 
know to synchronize with that advent, (such as the resurrection 
of saints, or the destruction of antichrist and his armies,) the 
relative position of the advent will still be clear. 

Such prophecies exist ; they are given for our study ; and 
with the Holy Ghost as our guide we may confidently expect 
to learn from them with certainty, the general order of the grea'c 
incidents, of the fast approaching end of the age. And not only 
so, but we may also expect, to be able to gather from such pro- 
phecies, read in the light of the whole revelation of God, an 
approximate knowledge of the actual period of the coming of the 
Lord. Of this we are not, we cannot be, intended to remain 
in ignorance, for it is with regard to prophetic chronology that 
it is expressly said, " the wise shall understand." 

Let us seek then to ascertain, first from Old Testament pro- 
phecy, secondly from the more advanced teachings of the New 
Testament, and lastly from the final testimony of the Apo- 
calypse, the relative period of our Lord's return ; and, as far as 
it is revealed, its actual point, in the course of the ages of human 
history. 

The second advent of Christ could not have been distinctly 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 21 

predicted in the Old Testament as a second; that would have 
involved a premature revelation of Messiah's rejection by Israel, 
of his death and re-ascension into heaven, and of the present 
dispensation of grace to the Gentiles. Prophecies so clear as 
either to procure ox prevent their own fulfilment, were never de- 
livered by Divine inspiration. The two comings of Christ, at 
that time both future, and having one and the same object — to 
redeem and restore humanity and to destroy the works of the 
devil — are seen as one, in early prophetic vision. 

A coming of Christ is, however, extensively and clearly pre- 
dicted in the Old Testament, of a character essentially different 
from his past coming, and which is to be accompanied by 
events of transcendent importance, none of which took place 
in connection with his first advent. It is therefore a future 
coming, and in relation to the first it is a second. He did come 
in humiliation as a gracious Saviour ; He will come in glory as 
a righteous Judge and King. In other words, without the ex- 
pression being used, the second coming of Christ is foretold 
and described in places too numerous to mention, in the law, 
in the prophets, and in the psalms. 

The Old Testament also largely prophesies, another great 
future event ; it plainly teaches that before this world's history 
is wound up, before time gives place to eternity, an age is to 
occur, which is to be earth's sabbath, man's jubilee, Christ's 
reign : the antitype of all sabbaths from Eden onward, the 
antitype of Israel's jubilees, the antitype of Solomon's glorious 
reign of prosperity and peace. Certain Scripture statements 
and analogies, (apart from the Apocalypse,) lead us to suppose 
that the duration of this period will be 1,000 years, whence it is 
commonly called the millennium. 

By the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began 
God has announced these "times of refreshing." The Lord Jesus 
when on earth alluded to this period, and presented it as an ob- 
ject of hope to his people. "Ye who have followed Me," He 
said on one occasion in reply to a question from Peter, " in the 
regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit on the throne of 



22 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the 
twelve tribes of Israel ; " to Nathanael He said, " Hereafter ye 
shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending an^ 
descending on the Son of man/' This age is called " the dis- 
pensation of the fulness of times," in which God " will gather 
together in one all things in Christ" (Eph. i. 10), in which 
every knee shall bow to Jesus, and every tongue confess Him 
Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil. ii. 10). It is the 
oft foretold, oft promised kingdom of the Son of man ; not 
God's reign over the world in providence; that has existed from 
the beginning, and could never therefore be the object either 
of prophecy or of promise ; not Christ's present reign in the 
hearts of his people ; not the present period at all, for Satan is 
at present usurping the throne of this world as king and God ; 
two thirds of mankind still worship him in worshipping idols, 
and are his obedient slaves and miserable victims ; the greater 
part of the other third worship and obey him indirectly, in 
serving sin ; and even Christ's people, the little flock who own 
Him as Lord, fail to obey Him perfectly. 

If Christ be king now, where is his honour? How does 
the dread majesty of his throne assert itself? He endures 
with much longsuffering all manner of rebellion; He allows 
his authority to be insulted, and his name blasphemed. He 
avenges not his own elect, who cry day and night unto Him ; 
He permits the oppressor to triumph, and the wicked to prosper 
in the earth. These things sh^U not be in the day of his 
kingdom. Ps. lxxii. presents the manner of that kingdom. Its 
features are righteousness and judgment, flowing from Himself 
as fountain head, and from all subordinate rulers as his 
ministers ; the poor and needy delivered, and their oppressors 
crushed; complete and universal submission of all kings and 
nations to Christ ; abundant peace and eternal praise. Clearly 
this kingdom is not come yet \ and clearly therefore it is yet to 
come. It is true that numerous passages speak of this present 
dispensation as in a certain sense the kingdom of God; but 
the expression also designates a still future period, altogether 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



distinct from the present in its character. This is the kingdom 
of God in a mystery, that will be the kingdom of God in mani- 
fest power and glory. 

And let it be remarked, this kingdom is no part of the 
eternal state which shall ensue when "the former things are 
passed away." It is the kingdom of the Son, the kingdom in 
which Christ as Son of man is supreme ; but in the eternal 
state the Son shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, 
even the Father, and shall Himself be subject, that God may 
be all in all (i Cor. xv. 28). Now the period during which the 
Son possesses the kingdom, and the period which dates from 
his delivering it lift, cannot be the same. 

Again, the dispensation in question, though blessed and 
glorious beyond all tfoat have preceded it, is yet government- 
ally and nationally imperfect ; mankind will be still divided 
into nations (Zech. xiv. 16), speak divers languages (Dan. vii. 
14), be distinguished as Jews and Gentiles, and as governors 
and governed (Ps. lxxii.) ; whereas in the eternal state all will 
be under the sole and immediate government of God. 

And further, it is a period which, though characterized in the 
main by righteousness, life and bliss, will yet be marred by sin, 
death and judgment ; men will still be mortal, and judgment 
will follow every transgression (Isa. lxv. ; Zech. xiv.), while in 
the eternal state there will be no more sin, no more death, no 
more curse (Rev. xxi). 

During this reign of Christ, He will have dominion from sea 
to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth (Ps. lxxii. 8); 
but in the eternal state there will be " no more sea." In short 
the former will be a kingdom characterized by the gradual and 
progressive subjugation of all things to Christ, in which " the 
last enemy that shall be destroyed is death," while the eternal 
state dates from death's destruction, and in it insubjection is 
unknown. 

This glorious age, is then a distinct one, which is to follow the 
present period, and to precede the new heavens and the new earth, 
in which the tabernacle of God shall be for evermore with men. 



24 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

We have therefore a great future event, and a glorioms future 
age, clearly predicted in Scripture, and it is a deeply momen- 
tous question which of the two is to come first. Is the 
millennial sabbath to be introduced by the coming of Christ, 
or to be followed by it ? Ought the church to be expecting the 
millennium, or expecting her Lord first ? Is the Divine pro- 
gramme of the future, first the millennium and then the advent, 
or first the advent and then the millennium ? 

It is strange that many children of God are content to leave 
this great question an open one, and to continue in willing 
ignorance on the subject. And it is doubly strange that too 
many who ought, as teachers of the truth, boldly to declare 
the whole counsel of God, should be content to promul- 
gate through the entire course of their ministry, views which 
they hold from education and from habit, rather than as the 
result of research, and of strong conviction that they are the 
truth, views which they would be at a loss to sustain by solid 
scriptural argument. They never perhaps preach on prophecy 
at all, but they constantly make use of forms of expression, 
and quote Scripture in connections, which tacitly and very 
effectually teach error. They thus endorse the vaguely held 
traditional creed, that death is the certain prospect before each 
individual, and that as regards the church at large and the 
world, the present state of things will continue to improve 
gradually, until it merges into that blessed period of righteous- 
ness and peace, in which " the knowledge of the Lord shall 
cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea." This is a serious 
evil; scriptures misquoted are an efficient means of convey- 
ing unscriptural views. Multitudes of persons who have never 
studied the Bible on this subject, or received any direct in- 
struction on it, have nevertheless, from this practice on the 
part of their teachers, imbibed views directly contrary to the 
truth. 

And the views thus thoughtlessly imparted, and thoughtlessly 
received, are yet firmly held ; for mental habits are strong. 
That which we have always heard and supposed to be true, 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 25 

that which most people appear to hold as true, assumes the 
authority of ascertained truth in the mind, and the moment it is 
attacked, prejudice rises in arms to defend it. The consequence 
is, that notwithstanding the late large and rapid increase in 
the number of those who look for the coming of Christ as 
their own individual hope, and as the next great event in the 
history of the church and of the world, the majority of pro- 
fessing Christians, and especially those who have little or no 
leisure for reading and study, still retain the opposite view, look 
for death personally, and expect the coming of Christ to take 
place, only at the end of the world. Yet that coming is the 
grand motive uniformly presented in the New Testament 
to love, to obedience, to holiness, to spirituality of mind, to 
works of mercy, to watchfulness, to patience, to moderation 
and sobriety, to diligence, and to all other Christian graces.* 
" That blessed hope " is essential to the production of the 
Christian character in its perfection. What consolation it 
affords in bereavement and affliction ! What holy restraint it 
is calculated to exercise, in prosperity and joy, and what an 
incentive it supplies to exertion in the Christian work and 
warfare ! 

And who is to blame that its power is so little felt by 
Christians in general ? How shall they hear without a teacher ? 
If their ministers never directly teach them the truth on this 
point, by expounding to them the numerous passages bearing 
on it in the New Testament, but leave them in ignorance or 
lead them indirectly into error, will the Great Shepherd of the 
sheep hold such under shepherds guiltless ? Earnestly would 
we entreat all our brethren in the ministry, to u preach the word" 
on this great subject, to give it in their ministry, the prominence 
it has in their Bibles; to bring it in, whenever and wherever 
Scripture brings it in, and that is in connection with almost 
every topic of Christian privilege and duty. 

* I Thess. iii. 13 ; Col. iii. 4, 5 ; Titus ii. 11-13 ; I John ii. 28, iii. 2,3; 
Phil. iii. 20, 21 ; Matt. xvi. 27 ; Rev. xxii. 12 ; Matt. xxv. 13 ; Luke xii. 
35, xviii. 7 ; James v. 7, 8 ; 1 Pet. i. 13 j Matt. xxiv. 46 ; 1 Pet. v. 1-4. 



26 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

It is vain to urge that the uncertainty of life and the possible 
nearness of death, are motives as powerful as the coming of 
Christ. Death can never be an object of hope to a Christian, 
nor a source of consolation ; God never intended it to be such ; 
it has lost its sting indeed to a believer, but it remains and 
must ever remain, a painful, humbling, afflictive, repulsive pro- 
pect ; salvation itself imparts no lustre to death. It must be 
so; "it is sin's great conquest, and Satan's chief work, the 
fulness of sorrow and affliction, the triumph of corruption, the 
fulfilment of the curse. Oh it is a strange delusion of Satan to 
have made the capital curse of God eclipse the capital promise 
of God ! Satan's consummated kingdom over the body to 
take that place in our thoughts, which Christ's consummated 
kingdom in the body and spirit, even the resurrection, was 
meant to take." 

Nor is it believers only who suffer from the habitual omission 
of a cardinal doctrine of Scripture in the teaching they hear 
from the pulpit. Who shall estimate the. injustice done thereby 
to unbelievers ? The coming of the Lord draw eth nigh! Why 
is not the fact, the (for them) awful fact, proclaimed aloud in 
their hearing, and applied with all the earnestness of love, to 
arouse the sleeper from his dream, to destroy the delusions of 
the false professor, to unmask the hypocrite to himself, to warn 
the wicked from his way? The coming of the Lord draweth 
nigh ; to them who know not God and obey not the gospel of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, that coming must bring everlasting 
destruction ; on them it must fall as a fiery vengeance. Should 
they not be faithfully forewarned of their danger? Should 
they have the right to reproach their teachers that they sounded 
not the trumpet though they saw the sword approaching? 
What saith the Lord ? " If the watchman see the sword come, 
and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned ; if 
the sword come and take any person from among them, he. is 
taken away in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at the 
watchman's hand " (Ezek. xxxiii. 6). 

Let sinners be startled by the announcement " the Judge 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 27 

standeth at the door," and not soothed by the sound, of a 
softly approaching millennium. Let them be warned of the 
speedy dawn of a day of retribution, and not led to conclude 
it, at least a thousand years distant. If the preachers of the 
word will fling carelessly aside, one of the best weapons in the 
armoury of truth, can they wonder that their work is not as 
effective as it might be ? If they would fain see conversions 
numerous as in apostolic days, let them preach the apostolic 
preaching, in which not only the past, but the future advent of 
Christ, had a grand and prominent place. 

The two prophets of the Old Testament who furnish the 
most conclusive evidence on this subject are Daniel and 
Zechariah. The former, a royal captive from Judaea, was a 
pure and faithful witness for God in the corrupt, gentile 
court of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, during the time 
of the Babylonish captivity of Israel. There is something 
singularly magnificent and massive in this prophet's interpret- 
ation of Nebuchadnezzar's divinely sent dream. Unencum- 
bered by detail, the grand outline of this fundamental and far- 
reaching prophecy, is sketched with the few but firm and telling 
touches of a master hand ; like the blue vault of heaven, 
" majestic in its own simplicity," and embracing in one vast 
span the whole extent and circumference of earth, it seems to 
arch in the entire future of the world, with celestial ease and 
stability. 

It starts from the time then present, and terminates on the 
verge of eternity. Its language is intelligible, and indeed can 
scarcely be misunderstood. Brief and condensed in the ex- 
treme, it lights only on the salient points, the mountain tops as 
it were, of human history \ but in so doing it must of course 
light on its most elevated and important summit, the glorious 
epiphany of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. 
Whereabouts in the chain does it place that summit? This 
is the point on which we now seek its testimony. Let the 
reader ponder it and reply. 



28 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

The Vision of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, to 
whom God had given universal dominion. 

i. Thou, O king, sawest and behold a great image. 

2. His head was of fine gold ; 

3. His breast and his arms of silver ; 

4. His belly and his thighs of brass ; 

5. His legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay. 

6. A stone was cut out without hands ; 

7. It smote the image on his feet ; 

8. It brake in pieces the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver. 

and the gold ; 

9. It became a great mountain ; 
10. It filled the whole earth. 

The Interpretation. 

1. Thou art this head of gold ; 

2. After thee shall arise another kingdom ; 

3. And a third kingdom of brass ; 

4. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron; 

5. That kingdom shall be divided ; 

6. In the days of these kings, 

7. The God of heaven shall set up a kingdom; 

8. It shall never be destroyed, 

9. It shall consume all these kingdoms, 
10. It shall stand for ever. 

The dream is certain and the interpretation thereof is sure. 

A succession of four similar universal earthly empires is fore- 
told, and that they are to be followed by a fifth, the empire 
of the stone. The first four would be established and ruled 
by men, the last by "the God of heaven." The first four 
would be destroyed, the last would destroy them. The first 
four would be smitten and broken in pieces, the last would 
never be destroyed. The first four would form one great 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 29 

image ; the last would become a great mountain, and fill the 
whole earth. The first four would be consumed and carried 
away ; the last would stand for ever. 

By the universal consent of the church of all ages, and of all 
sections, the first four are allowed to be the Babylonian, the 
Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman empires ; and the last 
the still future kingdom of the Son of man. The internal 
scriptural and historical evidence in favour of this interpret- 
ation, is so overwhelming, and the agreement of all students 
and commentators, of the early church, of the Greek and 
Roman Catholic churches, and of all Protestant churches, so 
complete, that the few who have of late years ventured to 
call it in question, must be ■ regarded as rash, unsafe, presump- 
tuous guides, who would destroy the very basis of all sound 
and solid interpretation of Scripture prophecy. It were super- 
fluous to argue the point in a work like this; those who 
require it can easily find abundant evidence, and that of a 
most convincing character and edifying nature.* 

We take it for granted therefore that this vision presents us 
with a brief historic outline, of the four great empires which 
have in succession held universal sway. It presents the last 
of the four, in two successive stages, first as legs of pure iron, 
secondly as ten toes composed of a mixture of iron and clay; 
representing under these emblems, first the Roman empire in 
its undivided imperial strength, and secondly the same empire 
in its divided condition. 

During this last stage of the last empire, occurs a super- 
natural and tremendous revolution. All the previous changes 
had followed each other in the ordinary and natural course, 
and the kingdoms were in some senses a continuation of each 
other, for the great image is one. But now a kingdom that is 
no part of the image, that owns a supernatural origin, smites 
the image, grinds it to powder, takes its place, blots it out of 



* See Burks' "Elements of Prophecy." 



30 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

existence, and fills the whole earth. This fall of the stone cut 
out without hands, must symbolise something immensely more 
important and fundamental, than any political change the 
world has ever seen. Tremendous critical revolutions, such 
as the overthrow of Babylon by Cyrus, and of Persia's power 
by Alexander the Great, have in this prophecy been portrayed 
simply by the quiet change from one metal to another, in the 
parts of an unbroken image. What then is the great event 
symbolised by the falling of ' tlie stone, which puts an end to the 
image altogether, and precedes the establishment on earth of 
the kingdom of the God of heaven ? 

Is it, as some assert, the first advent of Christ, to establish 
Christianity ? Impossible ! for the stone falls on the feet of the 
image. The first advent took place in the time of the undivided 
imperial iron strength of the Roman empire, not after its decay 
and division into many kingdoms. Christianity had already 
been established for centuries, as the religion of the Roman 
empire, before the state of things symbolised by the ten toes of 
iron and clay arose. 

Besides, the destruction of the image is attributed to the fall 
of the stone, not to its gradual expansion into a great mountain 
which fills the whole earth. Now Christianity did not destroy 
all earthly monarchy, at the time of its advent, or in its early 
ages. On the contrary ! Its Founder suffered under Pontius 
Pilate the Roman governor, and his apostles were martyred by 
Nero and Domitian. Nothing whatever answering to the 
crushing, destructive fall of the stone took place at that time. 
The development of the stone into a mountain does not begin 
till the image has been " broken to pieces together, and become 
like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor." Now the gra- 
dual growth of Christianity has been taking 'place while the 
image still stands, and cannot therefore be the thing intended 
by this striking symbol. Besides this, the spiritual kingdom of 
God now established in the hearts of men, is in no respect 
similar to the great universal earthly empires which form the 
four first of this series. It is not of the world ; it employs not 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 31 



the sword of conquest ; it does not embrace as its subjects all 
within a certain territory ; it is invisible, spiritual, heavenly. 
The empire of the stone is a fifth analogous to the other four, 
though of supernatural origin, wider extent, and longer dura- 
tion ; it is the universal empire of earth ruled directly by the 
God of heaven. 

What then must be the transcendent event symbolised by 
the falling from above, with destructive force, on the feet of 
the image, (or final form of earthly monarchy,) of a stone cut 
out without hands ? What can it be but the second coming of 
Christ with all his saints, to execute judgment on the ungodly, 
and to reign in righteousness and glory ? 

The symbol employed, a stone cut out without hands, is a 
most appropriate emblem of Christ and his church; that 
church which, as other scriptures show, is to be associated 
with him in the work of judgment. A stone cut out without 
hands is a miracle ; Christ in his birth, in his resurrection, 
was such ; and we his people are even now, " born not of 
the will of man, or of the will of the flesh, but of God " as to 
our spiritual natures, and our bodies are to be in the resur- 
rection " quickened by his Spirit which dwelleth in us." 
Many other emblems present Christ and his people as one. 
They form one vine, one body, one temple; so here, one 
stone. Our Lord applies this emblem to Himself, in a way that 
seems almost an allusion to this prophecy : "whosoever shall 
fall on this stone shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall 
fall it will grind him to powder." Peter applies it to the saints, 
" ye also as living stones." And Paul speaks of believers under 
the same figure as " builded together for an habitation of God 
through the Spirit." For more than 1800 years this mystic 
stone has been in process of cutting out. When " the trumpet 
shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we 
shall be changed," the separation will be complete, and the 
stone will fall on the feet of the image; that is, the Lord will 
come "with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment 
upon all." Earthly polities will then crumble for ever into 



32 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

dust ; empires, monarchies, and republics alike, will become as 
the chaff of the summer threshing-floor ; " the Lord shall be 
king over all the earth," and alone exalted in that day. 

Here then we have the first distinct answer to our inquiry, 
as to the relative position of the second advent. 

On the authority of this prophecy alone we may boldly 
assert, that it is destined to occur at the close of the present 
divided state of the Roman empire, and prior to the establish- 
ment of the millennial reign of Christ. And moreover, as the 
parts of the image bear a certain proportion to each other, we 
have some data by which to form an approximation to its actual 
period ; for the tenfold division of the Roman empire having 
already existed twelve or thirteen centuries, a strong presump- 
tion arises that its close must be at hand. 

We turn now to the second great prophecy of Daniel in the 
seventh chapter of his book. The following are the leading 
points of the vision and of the interpretation respectively. 

Daniel's Vision of the Four Great Beasts. 
i. Four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from 
another. 

2. The first like a lion, another like a bear, another like a 
leopard. 

3. A fourth beast, dreadful, and terrible, and strong exceed- 
ingly. 

4. It was diverse from all the beasts that were before it, and 
it had ten horns. 

5. There came up among them another little horn. 

6. In this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a 
mouth speaking great things. 

7. The same horn made war with the saints and prevailed 
against them. 

8. Until the Ancient of Days came, and 

9. Judgment was given to the saints of the Most High ; and 
10. The time came that the saints possessed the kingdom. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 33 



The Interpretation. 

i. These great beasts which are four, are four kingdoms. 
3. The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth. 

3. The ten horns are ten kings (or kingdoms) that shall 
irise. 

4. Another shall arise after them, diverse from the first 
(ten). 

5. And he shall speak great words against the Most High, 

6. He shall wear out the saints of the Most High; 

7. They shall be given into his hand, until a time, and times, 
and the dividing of time. 

8. But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away 
his dominion. 

9. The kingdom shall be given to the people of the saints 
of the Most High ; 

10. Whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. 

Nebuchadnezzar beheld the former vision, and Daniel 
interpreted; now the prophet beholds, and an angel inter- 
prets. 

The subject is in both visions in the main the same; but the 
second has many additional features. The four great empires 
of earth, appear under strangely contrasted symbols, to the king 
and to the prophet. 

In the former case a worldly idolater looked up, and beheld 
a great fourfold image of earthly dominion; it was terrible, 
yet attractive to him in its brilliancy. In the latter case a man 
of God looked down, and beheld four great beasts, terrible only 
in their fierce brutality. 

Power is a dazzling object of ambition; dominion has a 
fascinating attraction for men ; but the humblest saint of God 
can afford to look down on earthly glory, as from a lofty 
elevation, in the calm consciousness of undeniable and immea- 
surable superiority. Four great beasts : that was all the earth 
produced to the eye of the holy Daniel ! 



34 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

The divinely selected symbols have an evident allusion to 
the two leading characteristics that have marked the four great 
Gentile empires, in contrast to the Jewish theocracy, and in 
still darker contrast to the coming kingdom of Christ. Image 
worship and inhuman cruelty, idolatry and persecution, have 
been their characteristics. The image embodies the one thought, 
the wild beast the other. Nebuchadnezzar made an image, 
probably of the image he had seen, and demanded for it world- 
wide worship, persecuting even to the fiery furnace, those who 
refused to bow down to it ; and Daniel experienced the wild 
beast character of the second great empire, when condemned 
to the lions' den for his piety toward God. 

That the four empires symbolised in this vision are the 
same four previously symbolised in the image can hardly be 
questioned. "The number is the same, four in each. The 
starting point is the same, for each was given while Babylon 
was the ruling power. The issue is the same, for both are 
Immediately followed by the visible kingdom of Christ. The 
order is the same, for the kingdoms in the first vision, as all 
admit, are successive; and in the other there are no less than 
seven or eight clauses which denote a succession in time. There 
is the same gradation, for the noblest metal and the noblest 
animal take the lead in each series. Further, the kingdoms 
in each vision are described as occupying the whole space, till 
the dominion of the saints of God . . . The first empire is 
that of Babylon, for to the king of Babylon it was said, ' thou 
art this head of gold.' If we require the names of the two 
next kingdoms, the angel Gabriel continues the message of the 
prophet : ' The ram having two horns are the kings of Media 
and Persia ... the rough goat is the king of Grecia.' If 
we ask the name and character of the fourth empire the evan- 
gelist supplies the answer, ' there went out a decree from Cesar 
Augustus that all the world should be taxed ' ; ' if we let Him 
alone, all men will believe on Him, and the Romans will come 
and take away both our place and nation.' Four supreme and 
ruling kingdoms, and four only, are announced by name in the 



PROGRESSIVE- RE VELA TION. 35 

word of God, from the time of Daniel to the close of the 
sacred canon." * 

The main difference is that the latter prophecy, like a tele- 
scope of higher power, presents an enlarged and more detailed 
viewj especially of the fourth empire. The image showed that 
it had two distinct stages : one pure iron, unmixed and undi- 
vided ; the other iron and clay mixed, the metallic parts divided. 
In this fourth beast we discern a new element, the dominion of 
the little horn ; and we thereby learn the moral reason for the 
judgment, which, in both visions alike, falls on the fourth em- 
pire in its last state. In connection with this last vision, the 
coming of Christ to judge is expressed in a clearer form, and 
the share which his people shall have in his reign. But the 
evidence it affords as to the relative period of the second advent; 
is in unison with that of the earlier vision. It places it at the 
end of the last phase of the fourth empire, and determines its 
immediate object to be the execution of judgment, and its ulti- 
mate object, the establishment on earth of the everlasting king- 
dom of the Most High, in which dominion shall be given to 
the saints. It thus announces that the coming of Christ, will be 
prior to his reign over the earth, in company with his saints , 
and it furnishes more accurate data also as to the actual 
period of the second advent. This latter however cannot be 
adduced in the present stage of our inquiry, since it is con- 
nected with two points of disputed interpretation, the considera- 
tion of which must be adjourned to the second part of this 
work. For the same reason the evidence of Daniel's last 
visions must here be presented but very imperfectly, and with- 
out any attempt to enter into detail. 

We observe merely that the very comprehensive, (and con- 
sequently complicated,) prophecy of the " things noted in the 
Scripture of truth " (Dan. xi.), announces one unbroken series 
of wars, revolutions, persecutions, apostasies, disasters, and de- 
solations, as occupying the whole scene of vision, until Daniel's 

* Bides' " First Two Visions," p. 20. 



36 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

people should be delivered, and many of the dead arise (Dan. 
xii. 1-3). Now these two events, the deliverance of Israel 
from their great tribulation, and the resurrection of the just, 
are invariably associated in the prophecies with the personal 
coming of Christ (Zech. xiv. 5 ; 1 Thess. iv., 1 Cor. xv.). 
Therefore, though Daniel does not mention a second advent 
of Christ, for reasons before alluded to, yet he marks its place 
in this series, by the position assigned to the events which 
synchronize with it. Thus a third time he places it, at the 
close of the four great empires, or of the times of the Gentiles, 
at the close of Israel's dispersion and tribulation, and prior to 
the commencement of that kingdom, in which "they that be 
wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament,, and they 
that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for ever and ever," 
— at the close of the fourth empire and before the millennial reign. 

The reign of Christ on earth is distinctly predicted in 
Zechariah xiv. 9, and many of its peculiar features are men- 
tioned in verses which follow. This is an orderly and de- 
tailed prophecy, of the events that shall usher in that reign ; 
and we have a definite statement, that foremost among those 
events, " the Lord my God shall co?ne, and all the saints with 
thee : . . . and the Lord shall be king over all the earth ; 
in that day there shall be one Lord, and his name one." In 
other words, we have in this prophecy a clear declaration that 
the advent will precede the millennial reign. 

Again it is written "when the Lord shall build up Zion 
He shall appear in his glory." The building up of Zion, 
that is the restoration and conversion of Israel, must of course 
precede the millennial reign of Christ, over Israel and the earth, 
since it is inconceivable that Israel's dispersed and desolate 
condition, could continue during its course. A glorious epi- 
phany of the Son of God, is to accompany according to this 
prophecy, the building up of Zion, — a premillennial event. 
The second advent of Christ, therefore takes place before the 
millennium. 

The history of Israel is a typical history, prefiguring alike in 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. yj 

its broad outline and in its minor features the history of the 
church. What is the general outline of that history? Is it a 
gradual and steady progress from bad to good, and from good 
to better, culminating at last in something very good and 
glorious ? Nay, but the very reverse ! It is a downward progress, 
a succession of backslidings and apostasies, from the days of 
Solomon to the Babylonish captivity, and from the restoration 
to the fall of Jerusalem under Titus, and the final judgment 
and dispersion of the ancient people of God. Now there would 
be no analogy, but a most marked and marvellous contrast 
between the type and the antitype, if the history of the church 
were to be a gradual rise from the state of things we now have, 
into a millennial condition of blessedness, purity, and peace. 
It would do violence not only to the analogy which exists 
between these two dispensations, but to the general moral 
analogy of all God's dispensations. Without exception hitherto 
every dispensation has ended in apostasy and judgment. Eden 
ended thus ; the antediluvian world ended thus ; the theocracy 
of Israel ended thus ; the kingdom of Israel ended thus ; the 
ministry of the prophets ended thus ; the ministry of Christ in 
person ended thus ; the ministry of the Spirit by the apostles 
ended thus, in the full and final rejection of Israel and in the 
giving of the kingdom of God to the Gentiles. So far the 
Gentile church has pursued a precisely similar course, and 
trodden the downward road of apostasy ; and can it be believed, 
that the last stage of her course is to afford a total contrast to 
all previous analogies, and culminate in a millennium of moral 
perfection and physical glory? No ! "when the Son of man 
cometh shall He find faith on the earth " ? that is the question. 

When we turn to the pages of the New Testament the con- 
clusions to which these ancient prophecies have led us are in 
the fullest way confirmed. 

There are in the New Testament, apart from the Apocalypse, 
about a hundred passages, in which the second coming of Christ 
is more or less fully presented. About half of these afford no 
clear information on the subject we are considering, though 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION 



indirect premillennial arguments might be drawn from most of 
them. About twenty passages teach with various degrees of 
explicitness, that the coming of Christ will precede " the times 
of the restitution of all things " ; and there are four or five, which 
at first sight appear to favour an opposite view, but which on 
closer examination are found to harmonize with the rest. We will 
briefly review the leading passages of these two latter classes. 

The most cursory survey of them as a whole, however, 
suggests two strong prima facie arguments in favour of the pre- 
millennial view. It is a remarkable fact, that while in these 
scriptures, the return of the Lord Jesus is everywhere prominent, 
the truth of a millennium to come is scarcely asserted. It is 
assumed as an acknowledged hope in one or two places, and 
alluded to in a few others ; it is implied in some of our Lord's 
parables, but nowhere distinctly predicted, nowhere described, 
or presented as an object of hope. What is the natural in- 
ference ? That no millennium is to occur ? No ! but that 
something else is to occur before it ; and that the intervening 
event is the one, which the Holy Ghost would keep before the 
eye of the church, that intervening event being the glorious 
epiphany of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ. 

For, supposing for a moment that a thousand years of 
righteousness and rest, purity and peace, were designed in 
the counsels of God, to succeed this age of sin and strife and 
suffering, before the oft promised return of the Lord Jesus, how 
unaccountable, how incredible that so little should be said 
about it ! Supposing it were to occur on the other hand after 
that return, and consequent upon it, how perfectly natural, that 
in prophecies designed to comfort and guide the church during 
the interval of Christ's absence, it should be scarcely mentioned. 
Its character had been described in the Old Testament, and 
was well understood by Jewish Christians and by the early 
church. They expected its commencement indeed, in con- 
nection with Christ's first coming : "wilt Thou at this time restore 
again the kingdom to Israel ?" and would never have entertained 
the thought, that it could occur during his absence. The 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 39 

events that should transpire during that absence, and the return 
that should introduce the kingdom, were therefore naturally 
the great subject matter of the prophecies of Christ and his 
apostles ; the subsequent millennial reign, taken as it were for 
granted, occupied a very subordinate place. The silence of 
the Lord Himself, and of the whole New Testament about the 
millennium, can be explained on no other supposition. 

The period of the millennial reign is long ; its character is 
glorious, its events gigantic, its sphere universal; it will be 
no less than the subjugation of the entire world to Christ, the 
putting down of " all rule, and all authority and power," by the 
Son of God. If all this be to take place prior to his second 
coming, how impossible that He should overlook or omit it, in 
all his great prophetic descriptions of the entire course of the 
present dispensation. 

In Matthew xxiv. Christ describes his second personal advent 
and the great events which shall precede it. He reveals the 
course of this evil age, and its close. He foretells wars, 
famines, pestilences, earthquakes, persecutions, false prophets, 
iniquities, apostasies, the preaching of the gospel "as a wit- 
ness " to all nations, false signs and wonders, desolations, 
woes, including the great tribulation, and then He adds, c ' Im- 
mediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be 
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars 
shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be 
shaken ; and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in 
heaven, and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and 
they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, with 
power and great glory, and He shall send his angels with a 
great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his 
elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other." 

That these words describe his personal advent in glory is 
certain, and equally certain is it, that this comprehensive pro- 
phecy, contains no allusion to a millennium of blessedness and 
peace. Can this be reconciled with the view that our Lord 
expected that golden age previous to his coming? The 



40 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

same thing may be said of the series of prophetic parables in 
Matthew xiii. They certainly describe his second personal 
advent, and as certainly portray the leading features of the age 
which shall end with that event ; but they speak of no millen- 
nium. They describe exactly what we see around us, exactly 
what we know has characterized the past eighteen hundred years, 
a partial spread of truth, a vast upgrowth of apostasy and corrup- 
tion in the professing church, a gathering out of the great sea 
of humanity a mingled mass of good and bad ; but no subju- 
gation of the entire world to Christ, no signs of righteousness 
from shore to shore. If any one asserts that the parable of the 
leaven foretells a universality of godliness in this dispensation, 
let him reflect, that in order to give his assertion any value he 
must first grove that the " leaven ,; means good and not evil (a 
disputed point),* and secondly, that the " three measures of 
meal " means the entire human race, and not a definite part of 
it : neither of which can be proved. This is a parable without an 
inspired interpretation ; men can do no more than surmise its 
meaning ; such surmises should accord, not clash, with clearer 
revelations, and with the Lord's own interpretation of the para- 
ble of the tares and the wheat. 

The same thing may be said of all the prophetic passages in 
the epistles of Paul : take for example that in the Second 
Epistle to the Thessalonians. He first describes the second 
coming of Christ with his mighty angels in flaming fire, to be 
glorified in his saints, and to take vengeance on the wicked. 
He then foretells the great antecedent to that coming. What 
is it ? A millennium of righteousness? No ! a mystery of iniquity, 
the rise of the son of perdition, the manifestation of the man 
of sin, the fearful reign of Antichrist. Had he expected a long 
day of millennial light before Christ's return, how could he have 
foretold nothing, but a long night of spiritual darkness ? 

To Peter, Paul, Jude, and John, the future of this dispen- 
sation was overshadowed with portentous gloom. They gaze 



where 



Indeed, it may be remarked that in every other plase in Scripture 
re " leaven " is spoken of, it clearly signifies evil. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 41 

with sorrowing hearts into its dark depths; they warn the 
church ot approaching apostasy, and nerve it to meet coming 
persecution, encouraging it to hope for relief from both, only at 
the coming of the Lord (2 Thess. i. 7). Had they foreseen the 
Christian dispensation gradually developing into universal 
brightness, how would the blessed prospect have chased their 
sorrow and lit their countenances with smiles of gladness ! 
But no ! their looks brighten only, as they turn from the present 
dispensation to its close, and catch a glimpse of the rising of 
the Sun of Righteousness, " looking for that blessed hope and 
the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus 
Christ." If then the apostles expected no millennium before 
the second advent of Christ, why should we ? 

The second argument suggested by a glance at the general 
tenour of these prophecies is stronger, for it is positive rather 
than negative. The Lord and his apostles not only do not 
foretell a millennium of blessedness before the second coming, 
but they do foretell a series of events which could not co- 
exist with such a millennium. They predict a succession of 
wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes, persecutions, apostasies, 
and corruptions, the working of a mystery of iniquity, which 
culminates in the manifestation of the man of sin. Can these 
coexist with a millennium, whose characteristics are the absence 
of war, peace to the ends of the earth, universal prosperity of 
the righteous, times of refreshing, the subjugation of all kings 
to the " King of kings," the putting down of all rule and 
authority and power, the subjugation of his enemies beneath his 
feet, the triumphant reign of his saints, the filling of the world 
with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea ? 
If the former series of events are to characterize the entire 
course of this dispensation, which is clearly the teaching of 
Scripture, the latter cannot ; they mutually exclude each other. 
There can therefore be no millennium before Christ comes. 

There are a number of passages in which the duty of constant 
watchfulness, is urged on the church. Take that in Luke xii. 
as a specimen. The Master bids us be like men that wait for 



42 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

their lord, pronounces a blessing on such as shall be found 
"watching" speaks of the uncertainty as to the time of his 
coming, whether it should be in the second, or in the third 
watch, uses the illustration of the thief, and adds, "be ye there- 
fore ready also, for the Son of man cometh at an hour when ye 
think not." 

Now, though it may be difficult, to watch and wait for an 
event, the time of whose occurrence is altogether uncertain, and 
may be very distant, yet it is not impossible. But it is impos- 
sible to watch and wait for an event which we know cannot 
occur during our lifetime, nor during that of our children, nor 
for many, many, subsequent generations. The millennium has 
not commenced yet ; we know it is to run a long course of a 
thousand years. If we know it is to precede our Master's return, 
how can we be, like men that wait for their Lord ? The thing is 
impossible, and Christ never commanded an impossibility; 
therefore we must expect the millennium after his coming and 
not before. The early church with one consent placed the mil- 
lennium revealed by St. John, after the advent, and felt it con- 
sequently no hindrance to their obedience to the Lord's com- 
mand, " be ye ready also." An interval nearly twice as long, has 
it is true actually elapsed, and was of course foreknown to our 
Lord. But it was not revealed, and though a portion of it is 
prophetically announced, it is announced in such symbolic 
language as to secure its not being understood, until the under- 
standing of it would be no hindrance to watchfulness. The 
Lord Jesus knew that fifty or sixty generations of men would 
live and die ere He would come again ; and He wished each 
one, to pass the time of its sojourning here, under the hallow- 
ing and cheering influence of " that blessed hope." He cannot 
consequently have revealed anything, that would justify the 
conclusion, " my Lord delayeth his coming." The thousand 
years of blessedness that He did reveal in the Apocalypse, 
through John, must consequently be subsequent to his return. 

The apostle Paul twice uses the expression " we who are 
alive and remain, unto the coming of the Lord " ; whether we 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. ' 43 

regard these words, simply as the natural utterance of his own 
feelings, ©r as dictated by the Holy Ghost, they bear equally 
strong testimony to the fact, that the coming of Christ, and 
not the millennium, is the event for which Christians should 
look and wait. Taken as the language of Paul merely, they 
show how thoroughly imbued he was with the expectation that 
the then living generation of saints, his own cotemporaries, 
might witness the second advent. Clearly he expected no 
millennium first, unless he also expected to live beyond the 
age of Methuselah ! And why after the lapse of eighteen 
hundred years, should we regard the coming of the Lord as 
more distant from us, than he did from him ? Taking these 
words as an inspired expression, placed by the Holy Ghost in 
the lips of each successive generation of Christians, they are 
still more conclusive. It is a Divine warrant to all, to expect 
what Paul expected. The sorrowing mourners around each 
successive sleeper in Jesus, are to take up the glad strain, " we 
who are alive and remain, shall be caught up together with them 
in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever 
be with the Lord." The hope was never to lie in abeyance, 
never to be out of date ; but to be ever glowing, bright and 
warm, in living hearts. Therefore the Holy Ghost cannot have 
revealed a millennium, before the second coming of Christ; 
for such a revelation must render the hope of that coming dim 
and distant, and comparatively powerless, for the purposes of 
consolation to which it is here applied All the Christians that 
have yet lived, would have been unable to use the words of 
Paul ; and since the millennium has not begun yet, thirty or 
forty generations more, must be equally incapable of adopting 
the language ; only those in fact who shall live in the tenth and 
last century of the millennium, could do so. 

Again the apostle Paul (Rom. viii. 18) uses two remarkable 
expressions-, "the sufferings of this present time" and "the 
glory which shall be revealed in us." They respectively apply 
to this dispensation, and to the millennial age. He speaks of this 
present time as a period of suffering, not only to the sons of 



44 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

God, but to the whole creation, which is under the bondage of 
corruption and subject to death. He speaks of that future age 
as a time of the manifestation of the sons of God, a time of 
" glorious liberty." He says that the whole creation groans and 
travails in pain together, and that we ourselves, in like manner 
groan within ourselves, while awaiting that period. He defines 
the point at which the transition from the one state to the other 
will take place, the point at which the millennium will com- 
mence, the point for which we wait. It is " the redemption of 
our body " that is the resurrection. But the resurrection will 
not come till Christ comes, we know these two events syn- 
chronize even to the twinkling of an eye. Therefore the millen- 
nium will not come till Christ comes, and Christ will come before 
the millennium. This conclusion can only be avoided by assert- 
ing, that during the millennium, the saints and the whole crea- 
tion will be groaning and travailing in pain together, and with 
" earnest expectation " awaiting a better state of things. 

In 2 Thessalonians ii. 8, in speaking of the destruction of the 
man of sin, the apostle declares that it will be effected by the 
brightness of Christ's coming, the im^avela rrjs 7rapovo-[as. Either 
therefore the man of sin, the great enemy of Christ, will live 
and reign throughout the millennium, which is incredible, or 
Christ will come before the millennium and destroy him. 

The loving words of our Lord, " Ye now therefore have 
sorrow, but I will see you again and your heart shall rejoice," 
though they may have found a fulfilment, in the joy that filled the 
disciples' hearts, when they saw the Lord after his resurrection, 
have yet a prophetic bearing on the effect of his future coming. 
They harmonize with all the scriptures which represent the 
church as an espoused bride awaiting an absent bridegroom, 
and teach us that for the church that loves her absent Lord, 
joy can come only with his return. Either then prolonged 
sorrow, deep unsatisfied yearnings of soul, a painful sense of 
loneliness and bereavement, are consistent with millennial bliss ; 
or else there can be no millennium for the church, till after 
the coming of Christ. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 45 

The millennium will be a peculiar period, unlike any period 
that has as yet been known on earth. If it were immediately 
to precede the coming of Christ, it would surely have been 
mentioned among the signs of that great event which we are 
exhorted to note. But it is never so mentioned ; it is never 
mentioned at all in connection with an advent following it. In 
no one single passage of Scripture can the two events be found 
in this order; nor can a single text be produced in which 
the second advent of Christ is spoken of, in connection with 
a preceding millennium. We must therefore conclude that the 
millennium is to follow the coming of Christ.* 

Having thus reviewed some of the general teachings of 
Scripture, both in the Old and New Testaments, concerning the 
relative period of the second advent, we now turn to the final 
prophecy of the Bible, in the expectation of finding there, 
fuller and clearer light on the subject. The conclusion we have 
reached is abundantly confirmed by the general tenour of the 
Apocalypse, and by the direct evidence of its closing visions. 

This book presents the church as exposed to tribulation, 
and having need of patience, as bearing a painful and danger- 
ous testimony to Christ, and as enduring temptation and per- 
secution, right up to the time of the advent. Its author was 
in his own person, a representative of the church in these 
respects. " I John, who also am your brother, and companion 
in tribulation, and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, 
was in the isle that is called Patmos, for the word of God, and 
for the testimony of Jesus Christ." Never in the whole course 
of the book do we see the saints exalted and reigning, until after 
the second advent. The sweet picture of heavenly glory in 
chap, vii., occurs in unbroken sequence after a succession ot 
war, famines, plagues, martyr deaths, and political convulsions. 
No period of holiness and peace on earth is mentioned as inter- 
vening. The seven trumpets announce an uninterrupted series 
of judgments, up to the moment when it is said " the kingdoms 

* The order of the visions in Rev. xx. is no exception to this rule, as 
shown in the following pages. 



46 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his 
Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever" (xi. 15). The 
trumpets clearly represent, not millennial blessings, but pro- 
vidential judgment ; they leave no room for a millennium 
before the coming of Christ. But any remains of doubt ought 
to be dispelled by the closing visions of this book. There, 
bright, clear, full, and harmonious with every previous pre- 
diction, stands out on almost the last page of inspiration, 
a grand and detailed description of the epiphany of Christ. 
It is a symbolic description it is true, for the revelation in 
which it occurs is a symbolic prophecy , but its symbols, inter- 
preted by other scriptures, can hardly be mistaken ; they 
serve rather as the steps of a ladder, to enable the mind to 
mount to the majesty of the theme. And there too, immedi- 
ately succeeding it, stands out a second prophecy of the 
reign of Christ and his saints, symbolic too, yet simple in its 
symbolism, and with even its simple symbols explained to 
make them simpler. As we look into these last unveilings of 
the counsel of God about the future, once more we ask the 
question, what is the prospect before us ? A thousand years of 
bliss on earth, and then our Lord from heaven ? or our Lord 
from heaven first, and then a thousand years of bliss ? We re- 
member as we await the reply, that it is the last testimony we 
can have, till the event itself give an answer, the last prophetic 
utterance of the Holy Ghost on the subject. 

The Vision of the Advent of the King of Kings. 

And I saw heaven opened, 

And behold a white horse ; 
He that sat on him was called Faithful and True : 
In righteousness He doth judge and make war : 

His eyes were as a flame of fire ; 

On his head were many crowns : 
He had a name written that no man knew but He Himself. 
He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood ; 

His name was called the Word of God. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 47 

And the armies which were in heaven followed Him, 

Upon white horses ; 
Clothed in fine linen white and clean ; 
Out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword ; 
That with it He should smite the nations ; 
And He shall rule them with a rod of iron. 
He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of 

Almighty God, 
He hath on his vesture and on his thigh, a name written, 
King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 

Rev. xix. 

Every clause of this magnificent vision, determines the rider 
on the white horse to be Jesus Christ and none other. Heaven 
was opened to give Him exit; a door in heaven had been 
previously opened for John to gaze on its hidden mysteries ; 
now heaven itself opens, and its armies follow their great 
Captain. He bears a fourfold name ; He is called Faithful and 
True ; who can He be but " Jesus Christ the faithful and 
true witness " ? He has also a name that no man knows but 
He Himself; who can He be but the Son, whom "no man 
knoweth but the Father," the one, who of old said to Manoah, 
" Why askest thou thus after my name, seeing it is secret ? " His 
name is called " the Word of God " ; who can He be but He 
who in the beginning was with God and was God ? And on 
his vesture and on his thigh, are emblazoned the unmistakable 
words, " King of kings and Lord of lords." 

He comes to do a threefold work, each part of which be- 
longs to Christ and to Christ alone, as other scriptures abund- 
antly prove. " Ln righteousness He doth judge and make war " 
against the Beast and his armies (ver. 20). Who can He be 
but the Lord who shall consume that wicked son of perdition 
and man of sin, with the spirit of his mouth and the brightness 
of his coming? (1 Thess. ii. 8.) 

" He shall ride the nations with a rod of iron." Who can He 
be but the only begotten Son of God, to whom are addressed 



48 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

the words of the second Psalm, " ask of Me and I shall give 
Thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts 
of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with 
a rod of iron " ? 

"He treadeth the winepress cf the fierceness and wrath of 
Almighty God." Who can He be, but the glorious One, mighty 
to save, who says " I will tread down the people in mine anger," 
and "trample them in my fury" (Isa. lxiii.)? His vesture 
dipped in blood identities Him with this red-apparelled Con- 
queror and solitary Saviour. 

" His eyes are as a flame of fire," as were the eyes of the one 
like unto the Son of man, seen by John in the first vision of 
this book. Who can He be but that God who is of purer eyes 
than to behold evil, and cannot look on iniquity? that God 
who searches the heart and tries the reins, and from whom no 
secrets are hid ? " On his head were many crowns" for " domi- 
nion and glory and a kingdom are given Him, that all nations 
and languages should serve Him." Who can He be but that 
Son of man who is also the Ancient of days, Israel's long looked 
for Messiah, earth's oft desired King, the King of righteousness, 
the King of Salem, which is the King of peace ? On his head 
were many diadems : the royal crown, the victor's crown, the 
priestly crown, the nuptial crown, all befit his blessed brow; 
and on it rest the many diadems which recently adorned the 
bestial horns, united now on the head of Him who has van- 
quished them all. Who can He be but the One to whom 
every knee shall bow, and every tongue confess, the One who 
has received a name above every name ? He is followed, not 
by angelic hosts, but by the saintly armies of heaven ; who can 
He be but the one, of whom Enoch prophesied, " the Lord 
cometh, with ten thousands of his saints " ; the one of whom 
Zechariah wrote, " The Lord my God shall come, and all the 
saints with thee " ; the One who shall be glorified in his 
saints, and admired in all them that believe, in that day ? 

And this vision can be a vision of nothing else but a personal 
advent of Christ. It cannot be a vision of a spiritual coming. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION, 49 

every clause forbids the thought. For such a coming, it needs 
not that heaven should be opened ; for such a coming it needs 
not attendant armies of saintly warriors. The coming of the 
Lord with ten thousands of his saints has been regarded even 
from antediluvian ages, as his personal appearance to execute 
judgment on the ungodly. 

It cannot be a vision of a providential coming; the previous 
chapters of this book, afford illustrations of the kind of Divine 
interference in the affairs of earth, which is intended by this 
expression. In the opening of the seven-sealed book, in 
the scattering of the coals of fire on the earth, in the sound- 
ing of the seven trumpets, Christ is seen acting provi- 
dentially. But He is seen in heaven; thence He directs his 
various angelic and other agencies, for his providence needs 
not his personal presence on earth. " The heavens do rule " in 
providence on behalf of the saints, not in conjunction with them, 
whether man perceive it or not. If this vision represent merely 
a providential coming, to what end the opened heaven, and 
the forth issuing armies, following the King of kings ? No- 
where is it promised or prophesied, that the saints shall share 
with Christ his present providential government; but it is 
promised that they shall share his future work of judging and 
ruling the world. 

But further ; if it were a figurative, spiritual, or providential 
coming that is here represented, its character and its objects 
must needs be in harmony with those of all the spiritual and 
providential comings with which we are acquainted. In other 
words, if the coming here prefigured be an event belonging in 
any sense to this dispensation, it should harmonize with the 
known actions and operations of Christ during this dispen- 
sation. It does not do this ; it is on the contrary in abrupt 
and violent contrast to them. The line of action here ascribed 
to the Lord Jesus, and the line of action which we know Him 
to have been pursuing ever since incarnation, are so antago- 
nistic, as to preclude their characterizing one and the same 
dispensation. In the vision t " in righteousness He doth judge ; " 



50 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

in this age, in grace He refuses to judge, saying " I came not to 
judge " ; " man, who made Me a judge over you ? " "I judge no 
man " ; " neither do I condemn thee." In the vision, in right- 
eousness He makes war ; in this age, in grace He makes peace : 
He came to bring peace on earth, " He is our peace," " He is 
the Prince of peace." In the vision, " out of his mouth goeth 
a sharp sword, that with it He should smite the nations " ; in 
this dispensation we are not smitten, but renewed by the 
word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever ; the gospel 
does not smite the nations but quickens and blesses them. 
In the vision, "He ruleth the nations with a rod of iron"; in 
this age Christ does not ostensibly " rule the nations " at all, 
for Satan is the God of this world; but if He did, He 
would rule them in grace and by love, even as He rules his 
church, and not by the iron rod, of inflexible righteousness ; 
He spares the nations, He is kind to the unthankful and 
unworthy, his long-suffering is salvation. In the vision, " He 
treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty 
God," that is, He executes the holy indignation of God 
against sinners. In this dispensation, He manifests the 
love of God to a guilty world, He receives gifts even for the 
rebellious, He beseeches sinners to be reconciled to God. 
Who would ever think of describing Christ's present actions 
in the words of this vision ? The coming here prefigured, can- 
not then be an event of this age at all, it is the inauguration of 
a future age. 

But it is argued this vision cannot prefigure a literal per- 
sonal advent, its symbolic language proves that a figurative 
one only is intended. This is virtually to assert that a 
prophecy of the second advent of Christ is impossible in the 
Apocalypse; for it is throughout a book of symbols, it is 
written in the language of symbols, if it contain a prophetic 
vision of the second advent, it must therefore be expected to 
be a symbolic vision. Now seeing the second advent is the 
one climax to which everything in the book tends, can we 
suppose, that there exists in it no description of the great event 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 51 

itself? Impossible ! This then must be it t for there is no 
other. 

There is nothing in the nature of symbolic language to 
preclude its being used in describing literal events. The lan- 
guage of symbols is in this respect, on a par with any other 
language. The Egyptian hieroglyphics formed a symbolic 
language, but are the events of Egyptian history narrated and 
preserved in that language therefore figurative? on the con- 
trary, plain, substantial, literal, history is recorded in those hiero- 
glyphics, and plain, substantial, literal, events may in like 
manner be predicted in hieroglyphic or symbolic prophecy. 
Now a literal personal advent could not be predicted more 
clearly in the language of symbols than it is here. 

Besides which, the judgment scene immediately succeeding, 
requires this vision to be a real personal advent. Scripture is 
ever harmonious with itself, elsewhere we find the work of 
judgment is committed by the Father to the Son, and that the 
Son executes it personally, not by proxy ; He does not dele^ 
gate the task to others, though He employs the assistance of 
saints and angels. The husbandman who sowed the seed, 
comes himself to put in the sickle, when the harvest is ripe ; 
the lord of the vineyard comes himself to tread the wine- 
press ; so here. In former parts of the Apocalypse angels had 
been extensively employed. But now the Lord of hosts pre- 
pares Himself for the final battle, and comes personally to in- 
augurate by the judgment of the living, — the destruction of the 
antichristian hosts, — that great day of judgment, and day of 
the Lord, which lasts a thousand years, and ends with the final 
assize of the great white throne. 

In short, a personal advent of Christ, is the theme, the main 
theme, of the whole Bible. The past advent did not accom- 
plish the full results predicted ; since it became history, a 
second advent has been the dominant note in every prophetic 
strain, and in the Apocalypse it becomes more prominent than 
ever. From the " behold He cometh with clouds " of the first 
chapter, to the " behold I come quickly " of the last, this theme 



52 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION, 

prevades the book. The Apocalypse is a grand drama, the 
epiphany is its climax. " Hold fast till I come," is Christ's 
own word to Smyrna ; " behold I come quickly," his encourage- 
ment to Philadelphia; the redeemed in heaven, rejoice in 
the prospect, " we shall reign on the earth." On the sound- 
ing of the seventh trumpet, the elders fall down in worship 
before God, because the moment is at last come, when He is 
to take his great power and reign on earth. Under the sixth 
vial the Lord repeats the warning note, " behold I come as a 
thief" ; and the Apocalypse, yea the Bible itself, ends with the 
same promise, " surely I come quickly." 

" Now the present vision is the passage, and the only passage, 
where such a glorious advent of our Lord is distinctly de- 
scribed. Till then He is seen in spirit, as the Lamb in the 
heavenly places, as the priest at the heavenly altar, as the 
mighty angel, tfre mysterious messenger of the covenant, while 
the hour of mystery still continues, and still repeats the warn- 
ing ' behold I come? Here in the vision heaven is opened, and 
He is seen to come, in manifest glory as the Word of God. 
After this He is spoken of as already come. In the very 
scene where the powers of evil have just been overthrown, and 
from which Satan has just been banished, his people ' reign 
with Christ a thousand years.' When the white throne is seen, 
He is seen already present to occupy it ; and not a word is 
given to indicate a fresh arrival, of Him who sits to execute the 
judgment. All converges on the advent before this vision, 
all centres on a personal advent of the Word in the vision it- 
self, all implies a previous advent in the visions which follow. 
And hence the internal evidence that the real advent is here 
described, is complete."* Now this vision which presents 
Christ and his saints coming forth to judge and to reign is 
followed by others which present the judgment and the reign ; 
i.e., the destruction of the hosts of Antichrist, and the millen- 
nial reign of the risen saints with their Lord. We have there- 



Outlines of Unfulfilled Prophecy,' Birks, p. S3. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 53 

fore in the last prophecy on the subject, the clearest proof that 
the second coming of the Lord is to be premillennial. Will 
any one assert that a millennium, unnoticed and undescribed in 
the Apocalypse, has preceded this advent vision ? What ! the 
glorious times of restitution of all things, passed over in 
silence, as unworthy of a place in the great chart of the future ? 
Impossible ! and even granting it possible, whereabouts 
could we insert a millennium, in the long list of evil events 
and sore judgments of which the book consists? and even 
if any one find room for it, and satisfy himself by conceiving 
it may come in here or there, what then will he do with 
the millennium that is noticed and described after this advent 
vision ? Are there to be two millennia ? Does the word of 
God sanction such a thought? Are we to have a spiritual 
millennium preceded by a spiritual coming, and then a literal 
millennium preceded by a literal coming ? To ask the ques- 
tion is to answer it ! The whole Bible forbids the notion of 
a third advent and second millennium ! 

The only other alternative, is to deny that this is a vision of 
a personal advent of Christ at all. But then what is it? It 
cannot, as we have seen, be a figurative coming. What can it 
be? Does it describe nothing at all? Is the most magnifi- 
cent vision in the book destitute of signification ? Is it con- 
ceivable, that the greatest event in the future history of our 
world is not made the subject of a vision in the Apocalypse at 
all ? Where else can we find it ? Nowhere ! Christ acts on 
earth afterwards, He does not come to earth. This then is the 
advent vision, or — there is none ! And why should we doubt 
that this is its character ? Does it clash with any previously 
revealed truth ? Nay, but it harmonizes most sweetly with all 1 
He is to come after the resurrection, for He brings the risen 
saints with him. Here the marriage of the Lamb, that perfect 
union of Christ and his people, which cannot take place prior 
to resurrection, immediately precedes this advent vision. He 
is to come to destroy Antichrist and to take vengeance on 
those that know not God and obey not the gospel. Here this 



54 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

destruction of Antichrist and the kings of the earth and their 
armies, immediately follows this advent vision. 

Suppose for a moment, that the place occupied by it were 
left a blank, that the prophecy passed at once, from the mar- 
riage of the Lamb, to the destruction of the antichristian 
host. Other scriptures would force us to place the second coming 
of Christ between those two scenes. The destruction of the 
beast and the false prophet, demand a previous epiphany, ac- 
cording to 2 Thessalonians ii. ; and the rapturous marriage of 
the Lamb in heaven, the meeting in the air of Christ and 
his saints, requires a subsequent manifestation, according to 
2 Thessalonians i. io. 

When therefore we find a vision, symbolising in the most 
consistent and magnificent way, a personal advent of Christ, 
just where we might have expected to find it, just where all 
prophecy would conspire to fix its place, just where its ab- 
sence would render it impossible to harmonize multitudes of 
other predictions ; when we find it written large in letters of 
light, and stamped with a sublimity of symbol and circumstance 
worthy of such an event, and too grand for any other, we bow 
to this final testimony of the prophetic word, and admit that 
Scripture leaves no room to doubt, that the Lord Jesus will 
come again in person, to this earth, before the millennium, in 
other words, that the second advent will be premillennial. 



CHAPTER III. 

PROGRESSIVE REVELATIONS AS TO THE MILLENNIUM, THE 
RESURRECTION, AND THE JUDGMENT. 

WE turn now to consider the teachings of the Apocalypse 
as to the events to succeed the second advent of 
Christ, and it is here that the application of the principle of 
progressive revelation becomes of peculiar importance. 

That principle requires, as v/e have seen, that we receive the 
teachings of this inspired prophecy on its authority alone, when 
they are unconfirmed by other Scripture ; and it requires also 
that we be prepared to modify impressions derived from 
earlier and more elementary predictions, whenever this latest 
revelation of the future demands it. No author expects to have 
the latest and fullest edition of his book corrected by an earlier 
and less explicit one; no author but would wish on the contrary 
that early editions should be read in the light of the last. The 
Apocalypse contains undoubtedly, the last and the fullest reve- 
lation of God on these subjects, the final expression of his 
purpose ; prior statements must be conformed to this, and not 
this to prior statements. 

The advent vision is followed by a vision of the judgment 
on Antichrist and his associates, and immediately after this we 
have 

The Vision of the Millennium. 

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, 
Having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his 

hand j 
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the 

Devil and Satan, 



56 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

And bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bot- 
tomless pit, 
And shut him up, and set a seal upon him, 
That he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand 
years be fulfilled, 
And after that he must be loosed for a little season. 

And I saw thrones, and they sat on them ; 
And judgment was given unto them ; 
And I saw the souls of them that were beheaded, 
For the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God ; 
Who had not worshipped the beast, nor his image ; 
Neither had received his mark in their foreheads, or in their 
hands ; 
And they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand 

YEARS. 

But the rest of the dead lived not again, 
Until the thousand years were finished ; 
This is the first resurrection. 
Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection ; 
On such the second death hath no power, 
But they shall be priests of God and of Christ, 
And shall reign with Him a thousand years. 

The twentieth chapter of Revelation, as is evident to every 
student of Scripture, contains several new predictions peculiar 
to itself. 

The broad fact that there is to be a reign of Christ and his 
saints on earth is not new. Though little is said about it in 
the gospels and the epistles, for the reason previously assigned 
that they occupy themselves rather with the previous advent, 
yet the law, the psalms, and the prophets, teem with predic- 
tions of this reign of Christ. 

But that it should be introduced by a binding of Satan, that 
it should last a thousand years, these facts, dimly intimated 
elsewhere, are revealed here for the first and only time. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 57 

Are we therefore to stand in doubt about them, or try to ex- 
plain the revelation in some non-natural sense ? God forbid ! 
The God who cannot lie, inspired this single prediction of them; 
is not that enough? We need not hesitate to believe what 
God says, even if He say it only once ; and indeed we might 
reject most of the revelations of the Apocalypse, if we adopt 
the maxim, of doubting all that is only once predicted. 

Not only does this prophecy require us to believe two new 
revelations, but it also necessitates a modification of previously 
entertained views, on two familiar and all important points 
of our creed, the resurrection of the dead and the judg- 
ment to come. It reveals, what had never previously been 
clearly made known, that both are to be accomplished in two 
successive stages, with a thousand years between them, and 
not in one great act, as, but for this chapter, we might have 
supposed. 

Are we then to distort the declarations of this chapter, in 
order to bring them into harmony, not with previous predic- 
tions, but with the impressions we have derived from pre- 
vious predictions ? No ! but we must bring our impressions 
into harmony with the joint teaching of earlier and later reve- 
lations, which, seeing both are Divine, cannot be contradictory. 
No one would dream of doing otherwise, in the case of an 
earlier and later communication from some superior authority. 
Say, for instance, that the Admiralty issue a notice, that a cer- 
tain squadron is to sail next month for the Mediterranean. 
After a few weeks a subsequent order provides, that three ves- 
sels are to leave on the 1st of the month, for Besika Bay; and 
three more on the 30th, for Malta. Shall the commanders 
hesitate about giving credence to the later sailing orders, be- 
cause they had received from the earlier notice an impression 
that all the ships were to start simultaneously, and for one and 
the same destination ? Clearly not ! There is no discrepancy 
or inconsistency in the orders ; the difference is simply, that 
the later directions are more ample and detailed than were 
the earlier. From the earlier, the commanders received the 



58 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



erroneous impression they entertained; an impression they 
would of course abandon immediately the second order arrived. 

But as regards these later visions of the Apocalypse, too 
many act in an opposite way. " We thought," they say, " that 
Scripture foretold one simultaneous resurrection of all mankind, 
to take place at the end of the world, and to be immediately 
followed by the general judgment, the final separation of the 
righteous and the wicked, and the eternal state. What ? two 
resurrections? two judgments? and a thousand years apart? 
What ? Christ and his risen saints, reigning over mortal men 
on the earth, for an entire age, while the rest of the dead lie in 
their graves ? Impossible ! The Bible never says so anywhere 
else ! And Satan to be imprisoned for a thousand years, before 
he is cast into the lake of fire ? This cannot be, we never 
^gathered this from any other part of Scripture ! Either these 
visions do not teach such heterodox novelties, or they are not 
inspired ! True, they say this, but they must mean something 
else, for such doctrines are quite contrary to our creed, alto- 
gether at variance with the impressions we have derived from 
previous revelations on the subject." 

Such reasoning is not true wisdom, it is prejudice, and it is a 
denial of God's right to make progressive revelations. Wisdom, 
while perceiving clearly the discrepancy, would say : " Con- 
trary as these new revelations are to the impressions derived 
from previous scriptures, let us see if any real variance exist, 
and if not, let us abandon our imperfect and consequently 
erroneous ideas, and receive with meekness, all the light on 
these subjects graciously granted by God." 

We propose therefore first to examine what the peculiar 
teachings of these visions are, and secondly whether these 
teachings, taken in their most obvious and natural sense, are 
inconsistent with other scriptures, or merely in advance of them. 

Let it be noted then, first, that this is not a vision of the 
resurrection of saints, but of their enthronement and reign. As 
far as they are concerned, the resurrection is past already be- 
fore this scene opens. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 59 

Other scriptures definitely fix the moment of the resurrection 
of saints. "They that are Christ's" rise at his coming; his 
saints meet their Lord in the air, and come with Him to the 
earth (Col. iii. 3, 1 Thess. iv.). The resurrection must there- 
fore have taken place before the advent described in the previous 
vision. What was the immediately preceding act in this Divine 
drama ? 

Multitudinous voices in heaven, are heard asserting, that 
Christ has assumed his kingly power, and that the marriage of 
the Lamb is come. Now this marriage, celebrated by the glad 
hallelujahs of heaven, can be nothing else than that full union 
of Christ and his church which is to take place at the resur- 
rection. The angelic host describe the bride, as made " ready," 
as arrayed in fine linen clean and white which is the righteous- 
ness of saints, and John is instructed to write down " blessed ' 
those who are called to the marriage supper. Now not till after 
resurrection, can Christ present his church to Himself "a 
glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, 
but holy and without blemish," according to this scene : resur- 
rection must therefore have preceded this vision of the marriage 
supper. No vision of it is given in the Apocalypse ; how could 
there be ? It is the event of less than a moment, it occupies 
only the twinkling of an eye. It could not be represented as 
an occurrence on earth, for the risen saints are, in a second, 
caught up to meet their Lord in the air ; nor as an occurrence 
in heaven, for it is connected with the earth and the air. The 
precise locality or the nuptial feast is not indicated, a veil of 
privacy is thrown around the meeting of bridegroom and bride; 
it takes place, and this is all that we know. Whether any in- 
terval elapse between the resurrection rapture and the glorious 
epiphany, is not revealed to us here. But the epiphany has 
occurred; and the church, under the symbol of the armies 
that were in heaven, has shared in the work of judging the 
antichristian hosts, before this millennial vision opens. In it, con- 
sequently, we have not the resurrection, but the enthronement. 
of the risen saints. The expression " this is the first resurrec- 






6o PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

tion " is not a note of time, but of character : it is tantamount 
to, this is the company who rise in the first resurrection, not 
this is the chronological point at which the first resurrection 
takes place ; and the company here spoken of, like those called 
to the marriage supper, are declared blessed and holy. 

There is similarly no vision of the second stage of the 
resurrection in verse 12; the dead are presented as already 
raised, and standing before God. But though these verses 
give no vision of either the first or the second stage of the 
resurrection, they give much new light about it ; they distinctly 
reveal, that there is never to take place, a simultaneous resurrec- 
tion of all manki?id, but that on the contrary, the distinction so 
marked in this life, between the godly and the ungodly, is 
to be more marked still in the resurrection. It shows us that 
the righteous shall rise before the wicked; rise to live and 
reign for a thousand years with their risen royal Lord ; and 
that the " rest of the dead " rise not again till the thousand 
years be fulfilled. 

" And I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment 
was given unto them." To whom ? To Christ and his risen 
saints, to the King of kings, and to the armies which were in 
heaven; for we must go back to the 13th verse of chapter xix. 
for the occupants of these thrones. There intervenes no 
plural or collective noun, for which this pronoun they could 
stand. We may therefore paraphrase the words thus : " I saw 
Christ and his risen saints enthroned and governing the 
world." John noticed especially among the latter, the martyrs 
and confessors who had figured so prominently in previous 
stages of this long drama; their cries, and groans, and suffer- 
ings, and blood, had been main features of its different stages, 
and they are therefore singled out from among their brethren 
for a special mention, which marks the unity of this scene with 
the whole Apocalypse. In this final righting of the wrongs of 
ages, the sufferers are enthroned beside the great Sufferer, the 
overcomers sit with Him in his throne, the faithful witnesses 
of Christ, reign with their Lord, the oppressed and slaughtered 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 61 

saints, judge the world. But this mention of a special class 
is by the way : the main stream of the prophecy continues 
thus : " I saw thrones, and they sat on them, and judgment was 
given unto them, and they lived and reigned with Christ a 
thousand years; but the rest of the dead lived not again until the 
thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection." 

Subsequently, the " rest of the dead " are seen standing in the 
last assize, before the great white throne, to be judged. " I 
saw the dead small and great stand before God." The dead 
are thus divided into two portions ; there are the dead who 
rise and reign, and the dead who rise not and reign not with 
them. There are the dead who rise to judge the world with 
Christ, and there are the dead who rise to be judged according 
to their works by God. There are the dead who rise to sit on 
thrones, and the dead who rise to stand before the great white 
throne. There are the dead who rise with spiritual bodies; 
how else could they last a thousand years ? and the dead who 
rise as they died, to die a second death. There are the dead 
who rise emphatically " blessed and holy," and the dead who 
rise only to be tried, condemned, and cast into hell. There 
are the dead who rise immortal, for on them the second death 
hath no power, and the dead who rise only to become its 
victims. Throughout, these two classes are presented in 
marked and intentional contrast; the latter are beyond all 
question literal dead, so therefore are the former. 

This passage then teaches that the resurrection of the dead 
will take place in two stages, with a thousand years between. 
Taken in its apparent, most natural, and consistent meaning, 
nothing else can be made of it. Why then has it been made 
the victim of more distortion than almost any passage in the 
Bible ? And why, after the ablest champions of the truth, have 
in unanswerable argument, defended its right to mean what it 
seems to mean, why to this day, do multitudes still read it with 
the coloured spectacles of preconceived opinion, so as to 
change its clear blue of heavenly doctrine, into the muddy 



62 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION 

grey of mystical unmeaningness ? Why will multitudes still 
derange its majestic harmonies, so as to produce ungrateful 
discord ? why make of this graciously given clue to the laby- 
rinth of previous prophecy, a snare to entangle our feet the 
further, in a maze of doubt and difficulty ? Let an intelligent 
child, or any one who simply understands the terms used, read 
these verses attentively, and then answer the question, " will 
the dead all rise at the same time?" We will venture to 
assert they would unhesitatingly answer : " No ! this passage 
declares the contrary, the righteous will rise a thousand years 
before the wicked." 

Such is the obvious meaning of the prophecy, and the more 
closely it is analysed, the more clearly is it perceived to teach 
this doctrine. The difficulty arises from the mistaken attempt 
to put new wine into old bottles, to reduce the fulness of a 
last revelation to the dimensions of a more elementary one. 
Let us reverse the process, and applying the principle of pro- 
gressive revelation, let us see whether every previous prophecy 
on the subject of resurrection, may not without any distortion 
at all of the text, be harmonized with this latest prophecy. 

There is but little in the Old Testament on the subject of 
resurrection, for it was Christ who brought life and immor- 
tality to light ; but, though revealed only dimly in the olden 
time, they were revealed. Isaiah wrote : " Thy dead men shall 
live, . . . my dead body, they shall arise; awake and 
sing, ye that dwell in dust." Can this allude to a resurrection 
of others than saints ? Shall " the dead, small and great," 
sing before the great white throne ? But, to pass by other less 
clear statements of the doctrine of resurrection in the Old 
Testament, we find in Daniel xii. a passage more quoted than 
almost any other, in support of the idea that the resurrection 
of the righteous and of the wicked will be at one and the 
same moment. " Many of them that sleep in the dust of the 
earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame 
and everlasting contempt." The time of this resurrection is 
fixed in the previous verse to be the time of the deliverance 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 63 

of Daniel's people from their great tribulation, that is, the 
time of Israel's restoration, Antichrist's destruction, and the 
second advent. 

It seems to require some ingenuity to make out a contradic- 
tion between this prophecy and that of John. It places resur- 
rection at the same/0«z/in the great chart of the future; it 
makes the same moral distinction, and in the same order, as 
our Lord in John v., and it omits in the same way all allu- 
sion to a chronological interval. It neither specifies nor ex- 
cludes one, as was natural in a prediction so brief and ele- 
mentary, of an event at that time so distant. The apparent 
discrepancy is clearly caused by defect of detail in this early 
prophecy; and we have only to add to its statement, the new 
particulars given in the later revelation, to produce perfect 
harmony. 

Some expositors, however, render the original of this verse 
differently from our authorized version ; translating it " the 
many," or " the multitude of," which is equivalent to all. 
Others consider that it will not bear this version, but rather 
that the two classes contrasted in the latter part of the pro- 
phecy refer to the many who rise, and to the "rest of the 
dead," whose resurrection is not here mentioned, but who are 
destined to shame and everlasting contempt.* Whichever view 
may be the true one, neither, it is evident, presents any im- 
portant variation from the Apocalypse ; the two predictions 
harmonize as far as the first goes. No contradiction can be 
alleged between them ; we must not wonder that we do not 
find in the pages of Daniel, that which we cannot discover 
even in the gospels, a doctrine that it was reserved for the 
final prophecy of Scripture, to reveal. 

The passage of Scripture which more fully than any other 



" I do not doubt that the right translation of this verse is, — ' and many 
from among the sleepers of the dust oi the earth shall awake, these shall be 
unto everlasting life, but those (the rest of the sleepers who do not awake 
at this time) shall be unto shame and everlasting contempt.' " — Tregelles on 
Daniel, p. 102. 



64 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

dwells on the subject of the resurrection, the passage which has 
illumined the darkness of death to successive generations of 
Christians, and like the bow in the cloud, thrown a gleam of 
glory over ten thousand graves, is the fifteenth chapter of the 
First Epistle to the Corinthians. 

To the sound of its majestic and marvellous strains, we 
commit to the dust, those whom we bury in sure and certain 
hope of a glorious resurrection. But why does an intelligent 
and conscientious Christian, shrink from sounding over the 
grave of the ungodly those triumphant and heart cheering 
strains ? 

Because that chapter treats exclusively of the resurrection of 
those that are Christ 's at his coming! There is no assertion 
here of a simultaneous rising of all mankind ! In vain we 
search for any allusion at all to a resurrection of the wicked. " It 
is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption \ it is sown in 
dishonour, it is raised in glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is 
raised in power ! " Believers only can be included in the state- 
ment. " We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed ; 
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump ; 
for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, 
incorruptible, and we shall be changed ; for this corruptible 
must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immor- 
tality " ; that death may be swallowed up in victory, and we 
obtain the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ. There is 
nothing here at variance with the vision we have just con- 
sidered ; on the contrary, there are two distinct harmonies with 
its teachings. 

i. The resurrection of those that are Christ's is spoken of 
as a distinct event. " Christ the firstfruits, afterward they thai 
are Christ's" (not "afterward all mankind"). 

2. This resurrection is said to be, not at the end of the world, 
but "at his coining" which, as we have seen, is iooo years be- 
fore the end of the world. 

It is added "then cometh the end" and as well nigh two 
thousand years have already intervened between the first two 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 65 



events here predicted, it is doing no violence to the pas- 
sage to assert, that one thousand years will intervene (accord- 
ing to the twentieth chapter of Revelation), between the last 
two. The prediction marches with majestic step, measuring 
millenaries, as it passes from one scene of resurrection to an- 
other. 

1. Christ the firstfruits. 

2. Afterward, they that are Christ's, at his coming. 

3. Then cometh the end. 

Three great epochs of resurrection : that of Christ, that of 
Christians, that of the ungodly ; the latter not being named or 
described here, though its chronological point is intimated, it 
is at the end.* 

It is the same with the other great statement of our hope in 
1 Thessalonians iv. It speaks of a resurrection of the dead in 
Christ, and of such only at his coming ; and thus suggests, what 
the Apocalypse states, that "the rest of the dead live not again" 
till after an interval of whose length it says nothing. 

In Acts xxvi. 1 5, Paul, stating his own faith and that of the 
Jewish nation on this point, says " there will be a resurrection 
of the dead, both of the just and of the unjust." The vision 
we are considering shows this double resurrection, and adds 
the information, that its chronology is as twofold as its charac- 
ter, that the resurrection of the just, will take place a thousand 
years before the resurrection of the unjust. There is no con- 
tradiction here. 

In Philippians hi. n, Paul, — expressing his own ardent desire 
and aim, — says, " if by any means I might attain, to the resurrec- 
tion of the dead." Had he put before himself as an object ot 
attainment, and of difficult attainment too, a resurrection com- 

* In the typical "feasts of the Lord" (Lev. xxiii.) there were similarly 
THREE ingatherings. Thefirstfruit sheaf, on the morrow after the paschal 
sabbath ; seven weeks later the firstfruits of the harvest, " two wave loaves"; 
and at the end of the Jewish sacred year, the ingathering of all the fruits of 
the earth, including the vintage. These were the three feasts, in which all 
Israel's males were to appear before God. ''Thrice in the year shall all 
thy males appear before God " (Exod. xxiii. 14-17). 



66 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

mon to all mankind, and consequently inevitable for him? No ! 
but a peculiar resurrection ! A resurrection which was to his 
heart, as the pole to the magnet, a resurrection U tg>v ve<pav, 
"from among " the dead, the first resurrection, in which only 
the blessed and holy have part. In the same way our Lord 
spoke of being "recompensed at the resurrection of the just; 
could He have used such language if there were no distinction 
between the resurrection of the just and that of the unjust ? 

In John v. 28, 29, our Lord says, " the hour is coming, in 
which all that are in the graves, shall hear his voice, and shall 
come forth ; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of 
life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of 
judgment." 

It must be admitted that if we were obliged to take the word 
" hour " here in its most limited sense, this passage would un- 
doubtedly teach, a simultaneous resurrection of all the dead. 
But we are not. The word apa admits of wide extension, its 
•primary meaning is " season," and our Lord Himself, in a sen- 
tence immediately preceding this, employs it to cover the whole 
of this gospel dispensation, in which the spiritually dead are 
being quickened to life by his voice. If it admit of extension 
to eighteen hundred years in the twenty-fifth verse, it may well 
include a thousand in the twenty-eighth, and this is all that is 
requisite, to make it agree perfectly, with the apocalyptic vision. 
This grand and solemn prediction of our Lord announces that 
morally there will be two resurrections, first of the just, and 
secondly of the unjust ; the twentieth chapter of Revelation 
adds, that cJwonologically also there will be two, first of the 
just, and secondly of the unjust. There is no discord here, 
but there is on the contrary a marked harmony. 

There is a parallelism also between the spiritual resur- 
rections that are going on in this "hour," and the bodily 
resurrections that shall occur in that " hour." Neither are 
simultaneous ; though the latter according to the Apoca- 
lypse, take place only at two epochs, at the beginning, and 
at the close, of the millennium ; while the former are, as 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 67 

experience teaches, still less simultaneous, and take place 
day by day, throughout the whole course of the dispensa- 
tion. Would our Lord have used the two striking, distinct, 
names He does use, had He foreseen one general resurrection ? 
Would He have spoken of " the resurrection of life " and " the 
resurrection of damnation " ? 

These are the main passages in the Bible bearing on the 
doctrine of resurrection. We now inquire, where does Scrip- 
ture teach a simultaneous resurrection of all mankind ? And 
echo answers, where ? Yet many have so strong an im- 
pression that it is a fundamental doctrine of the Christian 
faith, that they feel bound to evade in some way, the simple 
obvious conclusions to be drawn from the visions we are con- 
sidering. 

So far from being at variance with previous inspired teachings 
on the subject, the fresh revelations of the Apocalypse enable 
us to perceive the Divine accuracy of many delicate touches in 
earlier scriptures, which would have remained unperceived but 
for our knowledge of this truth. Such, for instance, is the 
discriminating use of the four Greek expressions, rendered in- 
differently in our version "the resurrection of the dead." 
Moses Stuart says: "after investigating this subject, I have 
doubts whether the assertion is correct that such a doctrine as 
that of the first resurrection, is nowhere else to be found in 
Scripture. The laws of philology oblige me to suppose, that 
the Saviour and St. Paul have both alluded to such a doctrine." 
The Greek expressions, used may be literally translated " resur- 
rection of dead ones," " resurrection from among dead ones," 
"the resurrection : that one from among dead ones," and "the 
out resurrection of or from the dead." The Greek expressions 
are not used indiscriminately ; and it is evident that, had they 
been uniformly translated by exactly corresponding phrases, 
the thought of a resurrection of some of the dead, and not of 
all the dead, would have been a familiar one to students of 
Scripture. The phraseology employed on the subject is, in 
other words, precisely what would naturally be selected by the 



63 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

Holy Spirit, if resurrection were foreseen to consist of two 
stages ; but unaccountable, if it were all to consist in one 
act* 

It should be remembered also that a resurrection of some, 
which leaves others behind, is the only kind of resurrection of 
which we have any example. Such were the three resurrec- 
tions miraculously wrought by our Lord ; such was his own 
resurrection, and such was the rising which took place, when 
" many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of 
the graves, after his resurrection, and appeared unto many." 
Why should not that which has happened on a small scale 
happen on a large ? 

The Final Judgment. 

The commonly received opinion on this subject, that the 
whole race of man will appear simultaneously before the great 
white throne of God, to be judged according to their works, at 
the coming of the Lord, is based upon a great many passages 
of Scripture, and is tenaciously held, with a conviction that any. 
departure from it is grave heresy. But this twentieth chapter 
of Revelation, taken in its context and in its natural sense, 
requires a modification of this theory. It does not deny that 
the whole human family will appear before the judgment seat 
and throne of God ; but it teaches that they will not do so 
simultaneously, that the act of judgment, like that of resurrec- 
tion, will take place in two stages, divided by an interval of a 
thousand years. 



* The expression " out of " or " from " the dead is never used in the 
New Testament except of a resurrection in which others are left behind; 
it is used thirty-five times of the resurrection of Christ (and save in two 
passages where the e/c is omitted for the sake of euphony no other is used). 
The natural inference is that when this expression or a stronger one is 
applied to the resurrection of Christ's people, it implies a resurrection of 
some in which others are left behind. One who has examined this subject 
very fully says : " I am prepared to affirm that whenever e/c or e'£ is used in 
connection with dvaaraais, it is the resurrection of the just that is referred 
to ; or at least, a resurrection in which some are left behind." — See Wood's 
''Last Things," p. 59. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 69 

The Vision of the Final Judgment, 

And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it ; 
From whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, 

And there was found no place for them. 
And I saw the dead small and great, stand before God ; 

And the books were opened, 
And another book was opened which was the book of life, 

And the dead were judged 
Oat of those things which were written in the books 

According to their works. 

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it ; 

And death and hades 
Delivered up the dead which were in them ; 
And they were judged, 
Every man according to his works. 
And death and hades were cast into the lake of fire. 

This is the second death, 
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life 
Was cast into the lake of fire. 

This passage taken in its natural obvious sense, and with its 
context, is clearly a sequel to the previous vision, and can be 
interpreted only in connection with it. 

The "rest of the dead," who lived not again then, do live 
again now ; those that had done good, rose in the bright 
morning of this day of the Lord, to the resurrection of life, 
those that have done evil, rise now at its lurid close, to the 
resurrection of judgment. 

The expression " the dead small and great " includes all who 
were dead, at the inauguration of this great session of judg- 
ment : not only the " rest of the dead " left behind at the time 
of the first resurrection, but all cut off during the course of the 
millennium, as well as the immense company of rebels, de- 
stroyed by fire from heaven, at its close. 

A little reflection will convince the thoughtful of the impos- 



70 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

sibility, that the church of the firstborn should be summoned 
to this bar of judgment. They have already been tried, con- 
demned, and executed, viz., in the person of the Surety. Rom. 
vi. 7, (Gr.) " He that has died is justified from sin (guilt) :" 
death exhausts the penalty. Ever since the marriage of the 
Lamb, a thousand years before, they have been publicly owned 
as the bride of Christ, one with the occupant of the great white 
throne, united to Him, not only secretly by faith, but publicly 
in the eyes of the universe. They are his body, a part of Him- 
self; because He lives, they live also. And will He summon 
his dearly loved, blood-bought, long glorified bride, to be 
judged amid "the dead small and great"? Shall the saints 
stand and be tried, in company with their enemies and perse- 
cutors ? Why, Christ Himself is their righteousness, they are 
pure as He is pure \ shall they mingle again in the common 
herd of the fearful, and the unbelieving, and the abominable, 
and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters 
and liars, from whom grace made them, ages ago, to differ ? 
God covenanted with them to remember no more their sins 
and iniquities, and to blot out as a thick cloud their transgres- 
sions. Shall they now be called to account for the long 
cancelled score ? Ages since, they received the gift of God, 
eternal life ; shall He now call in question their right to his 
own gift ? For a thousand years they have been, by the Divine 
Judge himself, vindicated from every shade and suspicion of 
guilt, before the holy angels and the entire universe ; and shall 
they now descend from their priestly thrones, and with "blessed 
and holy " inscribed on their brilliant brows, and clad in their 
fine linen clean and white, as no fuller on earth can white it, 
stand amid the throng of the unholy and impure, to be judged, 
and judged according to their works? To what end should 
they mingle with the " lost," from whom conversion long since 
severed them, and with the dead, from whom resurrection long 
since divided them ? To be afresh acquitted, say some, and 
to hear again the " Well done, good and faithful servant." Be 
it so ! but then why is neither their presence, nor their acquittal, 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 71 

nor their eternal portion, even so much as alluded to in the vision ? 
Why is there no mention of these ? Why do we read only of 
" the dead small and great," and of their condemnation alone ? 
The answer is clear. Because the dead only are there ! They 
seek in vain, who seek the living among the dead ! 

Such then is the apparent teaching of this vision, on the 
subject of judgment. It remains to be examined, whether the 
strong impression in the minds of many, that this doctrine is 
not only additional to, but contrary to, the doctrine of other 
parts of Scripture, is well grounded or not. 

We must, then, inquire on what passages this strong convic- 
tion is based, and whether they do definitely teach a simulta- 
neous judgment of the just and of the unjust. Let it be borne 
in mind that this is the point ; not the broad truth that both 
classes are to be judged. " It is appointed unto men once to 
die, but after this the judgment," is a rule without exception, 
as far as we learn from Scripture. " Every one of us shall give 
account of himself to God." " We shall all stand before the 
judgment seat of Christ." There is no possibility of mistaking 
the all-inclusive character of these and similar assertions ; but 
they leave untouched the question we have to consider. The 
statements, " the commander in chief will review the army," 
"he will review every regiment," "every officer and every 
private will pass in review before him," prove that all are to be 
reviewed, but not that all are to be reviewed at the same time, 
Those who are forced by its internal evidence to deny that the 
judgment vision of Revelation xx. includes the righteous, are 
not thereby forced to assert, that the righteous are to go 
unjudged. The point to be decided is exactly similar to 
that we have considered in connection with resurrection ; do 
earlier scriptures oblige us, by unequivocal assertion of simulta- 
neousness, to give a non-natural interpretation to these final 
prophecies ? or do they, in the light reflected back from these 
latest revelations, accommodate themselves naturally to a 
different sense ? 

The close connection which exists between resurrection and 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



judgment, would lead us to expect that what has proved true 
in the one case, will do so in the other. The resurrection of the 
dead and eternal judgment, are never separated by any consider- 
able or defined interval. If therefore the former is proved to 
be divided into two widely distant stages, the presumption is 
strong, that this will be the case also with the latter. The two 
resurrections indeed receive their distinctive appellations from 
the results of the judgments which accompany them; the 
" resurrection of life," and " the resurrection of damnation." 

In reviewing the testimony of other scriptures on this 
subject, we are likely to find — in harmony with the principle of 
progressive revelation — many statements of the broad funda- 
mental doctrine of future judgment, which fall in equally well 
with either view ; some few which at first sight seem to teach 
simultaneousness, but which on closer examination will be seen 
to leave the point undecided ; and some, which can only be 
fairly interpreted, or fully understood, by assuming two epochs 
and scenes of judgment. 

Of the first class are such passages as, " we must all appear 
before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive 
the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, 
whether it be good or bad." " God will render to every man ac- 
cording to his deeds" (Rom. ii. 5). "The Son of man shall 
come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and then shall 
He reward every man according to his works" (Matt. xvi. 27). 

Many such passages exist ; it is not needful to multiply 
quotations, no argument can be built on them, in favour of 
either view. Without further revelation we should doubtless 
have understood them to teach a simultaneous judgment ; 
with further revelation, we can read them as broad compre- 
hensive statements, made by One who knew, but did not at 
the time wish to reveal, modifying details. Such passages men- 
tion the universality of the judgment, the twofold result, the 
fact that it is to follow our Lord's return, and they show that 
in either case the issues will be eternal ; but they do not touch 
the question of si'tiultaneousness. 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 73 

With the closing parable of Matthew xxv. it is otherwise. 
This is the leading passage, of the second class above alluded 
to ; those which seem at first sight distinctly to teach a simul- 
taneous judgment of the righteous and the wicked. On 
any theory this passage is one difficult of interpretation, owing 
to its peculiar semi-parabolic form ; the difficulty of deciding 
whether it is a judgment of the dead or of the living; the 
principle of the judgment, — works, — taken in connection with 
the eternity of the issues in either case; the limited nature 
of the test, on which the great award is made to depend ; its 
relation to the previous parables ; its likeness to, yet dissimi- 
larity from, other parallel scriptures ; and other features. But 
the following considerations seem to make it clear, that the 
scene here described is not identical with that in Revelation 
xx. 12. This presents an award only, that an investigation, for 
"the books were opened and the dead were judged out of 
those things written in the books ;" this presents the righteous 
and the wicked, and mentions the eternal portion of each , 
that, is silent altogether as regards the righteous ; this parable 
in describing those gathered before the Son of man, makes 
use of an expression applicable to the living, irdvra ra Wvrj, " all 
nations" or " the Gentiles ;" while the vision in the Apocalypse 
shows only the dead, " the dead small and great " ; in the 
former, the wicked are condemned en masse, on the negative 
ground of what they have not done; in the latter, as indi- 
viduals, on the positive ground of what they have done, 
"the things written in the books." 

If this parable does describe a judgment of the dead, (which 
is most unlikely,) then we are compelled by the later revelation 
to apply to it the same rule, as to the first class of passages, 
and to conceive that our Lord presented the judgment as a 
great whole, and was purposely silent, as to the interval be- 
tween its two stages. Other great and important events had 
to intervene ; the moral effect to be produced on the minds of 
his disciples by this truth of judgment to come, was the same, 
whether it were to take place at once, or at intervals ; and the 



74 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 



object He had in view did not require that He should enter 
into details, for which they were not prepared. The same 
Divine reticence, which had purposely hid from their view 
the interval between his own approaching departure and his 
return, hid also the interval between the stages of this judg- 
ment. In this view of the passage the first session of the 
judgment is at the advent, when the righteous are rewarded 
with the kingdom ; the whole millennium is included under the 
phrase, "then shall He sit 'on the throne of his glory"; and 
the concluding session of the judgment is at its close, when 
the wicked are doomed to everlasting fire. 

A considerable part of the impression of simultaneousness 
which it produces on the mind, is to be attributed to the 
parabolic form of this prophecy. Divested of this, and trans- 
lated into a plain declaration of the future, it would seem as 
natural, to apply to it, as to any other passage on the subject, 
the principle of prophetic perspective.* 

Our Lord's parables in Matthew xiii. are also adduced as 
teaching the simultaneousness of the judgment, but the same 



* Professor Birlcs, of Cambridge, to whose writings on prophecy frequent 
reference is made in these pages, while holding that there will be two re- 
surrections of the dead, the first at the beginning and the second at the end 
of the thousand years of Revelation xx. , lays stress on the simultaneousness 
of the judgment of the saints and that of the ungodly, as involved in the 
discriminating character of the first resurrection. In a letter to the author, 
written after he had read the first four hundred pages of this work, Professor 
Birks says : " I agree fully with almost every sentence in the first four hundred 
pages, except one small section, pp. 68-78. I think the vision from Revelation 
xvii. 1 toxxi. 8 is one integral part of the prophecy. I fully agree with what 
you write on the first resurrection, but I think you overlook the fact that this 
resurrection is a public act of Divine acquittal to those included in it, and by 
the distinctness of the two resurrections is implied sentence of condem- 
nation to those excluded from it. This account of final judgment then I 
thus hold to be parallel to Matthew xxv., and that the simultaneousness of the 
twofold judgment is more strongly affirmed here than even there ; but with 
regard to the judgment on degrees of glory or of punishment, this extends 
over the whole day of judgment of a thousand years, and the two parts be- 
long to its evening and its morning. 

' ' May God give an abundant blessing to your work, which I think to be 
one of great importance and interest to the Church, from the amount ol 
precious and important truth which it unfolds. " 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION'. 75 

thing is true of them. Their object is to unfold the present 
mixed state of things in the kingdom of heaven, in contrast 
with the pure state of things that shall exist after the end of 
this age. The division between the wheat and the tares, 
between the good fish and the bad, which takes place as we 
are expressly told at the end of this age, is a division effected 
at the advent, among the living not the dead ; it is a severing 
between real believers, and false professors ; between the true, 
and the apostate church. The tares are still growing with 
the wheat in the harvest field; "the field is the world." 
The fish are still struggling together in the gospel net ; there is 
no thought here of a resurrection of the dead, it is a sever- 
ance among the living. Other scriptures teach us that a 
resurrection of dead saints will take place at the advent, but 
that is not alluded to here. The tares are gathered in bundles 
to be burned, and the wheat is gathered into the garner. 
" One shall be taken and another left." " We who are alive 
and remain shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the 
Lord in the air." The parables of Matthew xiii. present the 
thought of severance, and not that of judicial investigation and 
award. 

We next look at the passages which teach more directly the 
truth, that judgment to come will take place in two stages. 
Foremost among them is our Lord's own memorable decla- 
ration, John v. 24 : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that 
heareth my word and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath 
everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is 
passed from death unto life." It is well known that the word 
here translated condemnation, tcplais, means judgment, and is so 
translated in the verse but one previous. The believer shall not 
come into judgment, when judgment is to be to condemnation. 
Not, he shall not be condemned in the judgment, but he shall 
not even come into it. The same word is used in verse 27 
and again in verse 29, where it is translated "damnation." 
Now this resurrection of damnation, or resurrection to judgment, 
is clearly that spoken of in Revelation xx. j and into that, our 



76 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

Lord Himself declares his people shall not come. There shall 
be a reckoning of Christ with his people, as many passages 
which shall be examined presently teach ; but this is not judg- 
ment. Alford says : " the reckoning which ends with * Ev dyaOe 
SovXe,' is not 'Kplaris,' the reward is of free grace. In this 
sense the believers in Christ will not be judged according to 
their works. They are justified before God by faith, and by 
God ; Ge6s 6 biKaiav—Tis 6 KaraKpivcou ; Their passage over from 
death to life, has already taken place, — from the state of spiritual 
death, to that far) aloivios which they e^owi already. It is to 
be observed that our Lord speaks in very similar terms of 
the unbelieving being condemned already, in chapter iii. 18. 
The perfect sense of perafii^Kev must not be weakened or 
explained away." Let those who hold that there will be a 
simultaneous judgment of the just and of the unjust explain 
this statement of our Lord. He does not say that believers 
shall not be condemned in the judgment, but that they shall not 
come into it. Can anything be clearer than this ? 

Into what judgment then shall they come ? Into one, dis- 
tinct alike in its objects, principles, results, and period, from 
the judgment of Revelation xx. 12. 

In the judgment of sinners the object is to determine their 
eternal destiny ; in the judgment of saints their eternal destiny 
is already determined ; they are, from the moment they believe, 
indwelt by the Holy Ghost, one with the Lord Jesus, possessors 
of eternal life, and heirs of eternal glory. The resurrection 
which precedes their judgment has manifested this ; for when 
Christ their life appears, they appear with Him in glory, they 
see Him and are like Him, conformed to the image of God's 
Son. Now it is clear, that when these already glorified saints 
stand before the judgment seat of Christ, the point to be 
investigated and settled is not whether they deserve and are 
to have eternal life and glory ; grace has already given them 
these, though they deserved eternal condemnation : but the 
point to be investigated and decided is, how far they have 
been faithful servants and stewards of their absent Lord ; how 



PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 77 

far their works, as saved persons, can stand the test of Christ's 
judgment, and what measure of reward each is to enjoy. 
Their common possession of eternal life does not forbid 
degrees in glory, and the fact that they are saved by grace 
does not forbid that they shall be reivarded according to their 
works. That this is a very different thing, from the eternal 
destiny of each individual, being made to depend on his own 
works, is evident. 

The judgment of sinners is on the ground of " rendering to 
every man according to his works," — justice; the judgment 
of saints is on the ground of grace, for it is grace alone that 
rewards any of our works. 

The judgment of sinners ends in the blackness of darkness 
for ever; the judgment of saints ends in "then shall every man 
have praise of God." The one is a judgment of persons, the 
other of works only. The one as we have seen is prefigured 
in symbolic vision in Revelation xx. ; the other is spoken of in 
various places, in the epistles addressed to the early church. 
"Every man's work shall be made manifest, for the day shall 
declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire ; and the fire shall 
try every man's work, of what sort it is " ; that is, the search- 
ing, penetrating, soul-discerning judgment of Christ, shall put 
the works of his people to the test, and only the perfectly pure 
shall abide the test. Some works, like wood, hay and stubble, 
will be destroyed by this "fire" ; but, even so, the man who did 
them shall be saved ; his works may perish but he shall "never 
perish " according to his Saviour's promise. In Romans xiv. 
Christians are urged in view of this judgment, not to judge 
each other, " for we shall all stand before the /3J)/za or judg- 
ment seat of Christ," not the "throne," as in Revelation xx. 

The period of the judgment of sinners before the great white 
throne, is a thousand years or more after the coming of the 
Lord. The period of the judgment of saints is fixed to be at 
the coming of the Lord. 1 Corinthians iv. 5 : " therefore judge 
nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will 
bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make 



78 PROGRESSIVE REVELATION. 

manifest the counsels of the hearts, and then shall every man 
have praise of God." 

We conclude therefore that these two judgments cannot be 
the same, and that so far from being at variance with other 
inspired prophecies, the twentieth chapter of Revelation enables 
us to understand and combine previous statements, and sheds 
new light on many also. Judgment will no more be simultane- 
ous than resurrection ; both will take place at two grand epochs, 
marking respectively, the morning and the evening, of the day 
of the Lord ; the former will be a resurrection and a judgment 
unto life, the latter a resurrection and a judgment unto condem- 
nation. 

Whence then has arisen the exceedingly prevalent opinion 
to the contrary ? From the littleness of the finite mind, that 
comprehends with difficulty the vast, far reaching, and complete 
designs of the Infinite ; from the lack in us of the patient 
continuance of searching the Scriptures ; from the irreverent 
neglect with which the last prophecy of the Bible is too often 
treated; and from the not giving it, even when studied, its 
due authority — the non-recognition of the principle of Pro- 
gressive Revelation. 

From Dean Alford's Commentary on the New Testament we extract the 
following testimony to the doctrine of two distinct resurrections of the dead. 

"I cannot consent to distort its words (Rev. xx.) from their plain, sense and chroiw 
logical place in the prophecy, on account of any considerations of difficulty, or any 
risk of abuses which the doctrine of the millennium may bring with it. Those who lived 
next to the apostles, and the whole Church for 300 years, understood them in the 
plain literal sense ; and it is a strange sight in these days to see expositors who are 
among the first in reverence of antiquity, complacently casting aside the most cogent 
instance of consensus which p7'imitive antiquity presents. As regards the text itself, 
no legitimate treatment of it will extort what is known as the spiritual interpreta- 
tion nozu 111 fashion. If, in a passage where two resurrect ions are mentioned, where 
certain xf/vx<xi efocrav at the first, and the rest of the veicpoi e^rjerav only at 
the end of a specified period after that first,— if in such a passaee the first 
resurrection may be understood to mean spirihtal rising with Christ, while "the second 
means literal rising from the grave ; then there is an end of all significance of language, 
and Scripture is wiped out as a definite testimony to anything. If the first resurrection 
is spiritual, then so is the second, which I suppose none will be hardy enough to main- 
tain ; but if the second is literal, then so is the first, which in common with 
the whole primitive Church and many of the best modem expositors, I maintain and 
receive as an article of faith a)id hope." 

End of Part I. 



PART II. 
PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 



CHAPTER L 

HUMAN COMPREHENSION OF DIVINE PROPHECY HAS BEEN, AND 

WAS INTENDED TO BE, PROGRESSIVE. THREE IMPORTANT 

INFERENCES FROM DANIEL XII. 9. THERE IS A BLAMELESS 

AND A GUILTY IGNORANCE OF THE FULFILMENT OF PRO- 
PHECY. INSTANCES OF EACH. — REASONS FOR A PARTIAL 

AND TEMPORARY OBSCURITY OF PROPHECY; AND MEANS 
BY WHICH PROGRESSIVE COMPREHENSION OF ITS SIGNIFICA- 
TION HAS BEEN GRANTED. 

WE have seen that God has been pleased to reveal the 
future to men only by degrees ; that both in the num- 
ber of subjects on which the light of prophecy has been per- 
mitted to fall, and in the clearness and fulness of the light 
granted on each, there has been constant and steady increase, 
from the pale and solitary ray of Eden, to the clear widespread 
beams of Daniel, and to the rich glow of the Apocalypse. 

We now proceed to show that human comprehension of 
Divine prophecy has also been by degrees ; and that in certain 
cases it was evidently intended by God to be so. Light to 
understand the prophetic word, is as much a Divine gift as that 
word itself. The sovereignty of God was exercised in the 
selection of the matters to be revealed by prophecy, the time 
of the revelation, and the individuals to whom, and through 
whom, it should be communicated. And it is equally exercised 



8o PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

in the determination of the degree to which, and the time at 
which, the true meaning of certain prophecies shall be un- 
veiled, as well as in the selection of the individuals to whom 
the interpretation shall be given. " The Lord hath not only- 
spoken by dreams and visions of old, but He speaketh also 
every day, even as often as He enlighten eth the minds of his 
servants, that they may be able to search out the hidden truth 
of his word, and bring it forth unto the world."* 

Prophecy, being essentially a revelation of the future, is of 
course designed to be understood ; but it does not follow that it 
is designed to be understood immediately on its being given, 
nor by all who become acquainted with its announcements. 
The Most High has various ends to answer in predicting the 
future ; and though we may not always be able to discern his 
reasons for making revelations before He intends them to be 
comprehended, yet in some cases they are sufficiently clear. 

In foretelling, for instance, the first advent of his Son, God 
might have been pleased to predict its results, in as clear and 
unmistakable a manner as He predicted the event itself. But 
plainly to have foretold the rejection and crucifixion of the 
Lord Jesus by Israel, would have been to interfere with the 
free agency of man ; it must either have had the effect of pre- 
venting the crucifixion of Christ, or else have given the Jews a 
valid excuse for killing the Prince of life. 

Not to have foretold the actual results at all, on the other 
hand, would have been to deprive Christianity of one of its 
main pillars of evidence, the fact that the events of the life and 
death of Jesus of Nazareth were predicted centuries before they 
took place ; it would have been to give some ground for pre- 
sent Jewish unbelief. The alternative was to reveal the suffer- 
ing and death of Christ, but to reveal them in such a manner 
that " both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and 
the people of Israel," when banded together to carry out their 
own wicked wills, were quite unconscious that they were therein 



* See preface to Brightman's " Revelation of the Revelation," i6iy 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 81 

doing, what his hand and his counsel had " determined before 
to be done." This secured the good, and avoided the evil ; the 
predictions were full and definite, and yet capable of being mis- 
understood : as a fact, they were not understood even by the 
disciples at first, nor are they understood to this day by the 
Jewish nation. They ought to have known Him, but " because 
they knew Him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are 
read every sabbath day, they fulfilled them in condemning 
Him." 

Thus it is possible to possess prophecies of certain events, to 
read them diligently all our lives, and yet not to understand 
their fulfilment, even when it takes place before our own eyes. 
This is sinful unbelief; but there is a temporary inability to 
understand Divine predictions, which is entirely free from sin, 
which is inevitable, and indeed ordained of God. 

The book of Daniel is one of the fullest revelations of the 
future contained in the Bible ; it is unequalled for the variety 
and minuteness of its historical detail, and for its breadth ol 
range, both chronological and geographical. It is closed by 
this remarkable injunction, (which applies, however, mainly to 
the last prophecy in the book) : " But thou, O Daniel, shut up 
the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end; many 
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased . . . 
none of the wicked shall understand, but the wise shall under- 
stand." 

This passage seems to warrant three inferences of import- 
ance. 

1 . That though God for certain reasons saw fit to give this 
revelation of the future to Daniel at a certain date, He did not 
intend it to be understood for centuries ; since, whatever may be 
the exact limits of the " time of the end" it could not include 
more than the course of this dispensation, and the commence- 
ment of this dispensation was several centuries distant, when 
Daniel wrote. 

2. That even when in the lapse of ages the meaning of this 
prophecy should become apparent to some, even when " know- 

G 



82 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

ledge " should " be increased " and the wise understand, it was 
the will of God that it should still remain a dark mystery to 
others, that "none of the wicked should understand." 

3. And thirdly that the comprehension or ignorance of this 
prophecy, when the time for its being understood at all arrived, 
would depend rather on the moral than on the intellectual state 
of those who should study it. The wise alone should under- 
stand it ; the wicked should not. 

The first of these inferences is confirmed by 1 Peter i. 10 : 
" The prophets inquired and searched diligently . . . what 
manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did sig- 
nify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the 
glory that should follow. Unto whom it was revealed that not 
tmto the?nselves, but unto us they did minister the things . . . 
the angels desire to look into." Peter here alludes evidently 
to this very passage of Daniel who " inquired and searched 
diligently" about the time of the events revealed to him, ("O 
my Lord, what shall be the end of these things ? ") but he lays 
it down as a general principle, applicable to other prophets as 
well, that when they " testified beforehand, of the sufferings of 
Christ and the glories that should follow," they ministered not 
unto themselves but unto us. That is, they revealed not a 
proximate future, interesting themselves and their brethren of 
the Jewish economy especially, but a more distant future, per- 
taining to another dispensation altogether, and not designed to 
be understood till that dispensation dawned. 

The second of these inferences, that even when light was 
vouchsafed it would be partial, is confirmed by the words of 
our Lord, " it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the 
kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given." " Thou hast 
hid these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them 
unto babes." 

The third inference, as to the moral character of those 
who receive prophetic light, is also confirmed by his words, 
" if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine." 
It is " scoffers walking after their own lusts " who are repre- 



ROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 83 

sented as saying " where is the promise of his coming ? " and 
as being " willingly ignorant " of the purpose of God as ex- 
pressed in type, and in prophecy about the future. 

It is evident therefore that there may be such a thing as a 
blameless ignorance of the meaning of prophecy, as well as a 
blameworthy and guilty ignorance of it. The prophets were 
not to be blamed, for not understanding what God did not in- 
tend them to understand. Jews and infidels now, are to be 
blamed for a guilty unwillingness to perceive, the accomplish- 
ment of Old Testament prophecies, in New Testament events. 

Take as an instance of blameless ignorance, that of the 
apostles, even after Pentecost, as to the calling of the Gentiles. 
This, though in one sense a hidden mystery (Eph. iii. 9), had 
as a matter of fact, long been a revealed purpose of God. 
It had been foretold in type, in prophecy, and in promise, 
so that in Romans xiv. the apostle makes no less than four 
quotations in succession, to prove that // was written, and in 
Acts xv. James admits that "to this agree the words of the 
prophets." It was revealed, but not designed to be understood 
till a certain time, and then a special vision was sent to Peter, 
and a special revelation on the subject granted to Paul (Eph, 
iii. 3), to prepare their minds for the fulfilment of these long 
extant predictions, and to induce them to preach among the 
Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. 

Take as an instance of guilty ignorance, in the face of actual 
fulfilment, Jewish misunderstanding respecting the prophecies of 
the rejection and death of Messiah the prince. These events 
were, as we have seen, distinctly revealed ; He was to be " de- 
spised and rejected of men," "led as a lamb to the slaughter," 
"cut off yet not for Himself" ; but the revelation was under- 
stood neither by " wise " nor " wicked " for a time. When the 
event had fulfilled and interpreted these predictions, the risen 
Saviour had still to address, to the two disciples going to Em- 
maus, that rebuke which assumes both the fact of the revelation 
and of their duty to understand it : " O fools and slow of heart 
to believe, all that the prophets have spoken ; ought not Christ 



84 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" 
To this day, those who have their minds still blinded 
through Jewish unbelief, find " a vail untaken away in the read- 
ing of the Old Testament " and cannot perceive the accom- 
plishment of the Messianic prophecies in the life and death 
of Jesus of Nazareth. 

Our Lord Himself revealed much that He knew his dis- 
ciples did not and could not understand at the time ; though 
He also withheld much that they were unprepared to re- 
ceive. " Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise 
it up." It was not till after He was risen from the dead, 
that they caught the deep meaning of those pregnant words. 
"I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
bear them now." " The Comforter which is the Holy Ghost, 
shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remem- 
brance, whatsoever I have said unto you." 

Even after the resurrection had taken place we read, "as yet 
they knew not the scriptures that He should rise again from 
the dead." They were familiar with the words " Thou wilt not 
leave my soul in hades, neither wilt Thou suffer thine Holy One 
to see corruption "; but, even standing beside the empty sepul- 
chre, the true meaning of the words failed to penetrate the mists 
of Jewish prejudice, which darkened their minds. After Pente- 
cost however, when Peter had not only the inspired prophecy, 
but the inspiring Spirit to interpret it, how lucid and authorita- 
tive his explanation of these words : "men and brethren, let me 
freely speak unto you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead 
and buried, and his sepulchre is with us unto this day. . . . 
He being a prophet, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that 
his soul was not left in hades, neither his flesh did see cor- 
ruption. This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
witnesses." On the same occasion he asserts that the pentecostal 
effusion of the Spirit, at which his audience were ignorantly 
marvelling, was the fulfilment of Joel's familiar but little un- 
derstood prediction: "this is that which was spoken by the 
prophet Joel." How did he know it ? The " untoward gene- 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 85 

ration " whom he addressed thought not so, nor dreamed that 
they were witnessing the fulfilment of a Divine prophecy. 
Their account of the matter was very different ; " these men 
are full of new wine." This proves that spiritual enlightenment 
is required, for the perception of the fulfilment of prophecy, even in 
startling events which may be taking place before our eyes. 

It is not too much to assume that the Apocalypse of St. John 
was also designed to be progressively understood ; that it forms 
no exception to the general rule, but was given to reveal the 
future by degrees, and only in proportion as the understanding 
of it might conduce, to the accomplishment of God's purposes, 
and the good of his people. Analogy forbids us to suppose, 
that such a prophecy could be clear all at once, to those to 
whom it was first given, and it equally forbids the supposition 
that it was never to be understood or interpreted at all. Can 
we not perceive reasons why God should in this case, act 
as He had so often acted before, and progressively reveal its 
meaning ? and can we not also perceive means by which such a 
progressive revelation of the meaning of this prophecy, might, 
as time rolled on, be made ? 

These questions may be unhesitatingly answered in the 
affirmative. There are evident and weighty reasons why, in 
this prophecy above all others, the truth should not have been 
all at once apparent ; and although this book was the last work 
of the last apostle, and closes the canon of Scripture, it is not 
difficult to see the means by which God Himself might unveil 
its signification, at an advanced period of the dispensation. 

Let it be granted for a moment, (as it shall we hope be sub- 
sequently proved) that this prophecy contains an outline of all 
the great events of interest to the church of God, which were 
to happen prior to the second advent of Christ, as well as of 
that advent itself, and subsequent events ; and that not only 
are the events themselves predicted, but that the actual chrono- 
logy of some of them is predicted also, the duration for instance 
of the antichristian apostasy for a period of 1260 years. Sup- 
posing this to be the case, it is clear that God, though giving 



56 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 



the prophecy in the apostolic age, cannot have intended it to 
be understood for many many subsequent generations. It 
was the express will of Christ that the church should be ever 
waiting and watching for her Lord, uncertain as to the time of 
his return. The Holy Spirit could therefore no more have 
revealed clearly to the early church 1260 years of apostasy prior 
to the return of Christ, than He could have revealed a thousand 
years of millennial blessedness ; which as we have previously 
shown would have been inconsistent with his purpose. 

Must we therefore conclude : " this then cannot be the character 
of the Apocalypse; the same argument that proves that the mil- 
lennium must succeed the advent, proves also that no long period of 
apostasy can be p7'edicted as to precede it " ? No ! but we con- 
clude hence, that if such a period be revealed, it must be in a 
mysterious form, not intended or adapted for comprehension 
at the time. If an apostasy of such duration be predicted, it 
must be so predicted as that the true, full, meaning of the pre- 
diction, should not be obvious for centuries, and yet be evident, 
as soon as altered circumstances should render the understand- 
ing of the prediction, desirable for the glory of God and the 
good of the church. 

A consideration of the problem shows, that the very same 
end that was to be attained by the church's ignorance of the 
true nature and duration of the apostasy in early ages, will in 
these last days be better attained by her acquaintance with 
both ; and will lead us to admire the wisdom and the grace of 
Him, who in this prophecy secured for her that ignorance while 
it was best, and laid up in store for her that knowledge, against 
the time when it should, in its turn, be most beneficial. 

" Known unto God are all his works from the beginning;" the 
real history and length of this dispensation were of course not 
only foreseen, but foreordained of God. For certain reasons 
Christ never mentioned them to his disciples, and the Holy 
Ghost revealed but little about them to Peter and Paul. What 
were those reasons ? To keep alive loving expectation of the 
Lord's second coming, to encourage believers to constant 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. S? 

watchfulness, to cheer them by a present hope, and to weaken 
the power of temptation to earthliness and worldliness, by- 
stamping on all things here uncertainty and evanescence. 
Her ignorance of the time of the Master's return, is made a 
motive to " patient waiting for Christ." The first generation 
of believers took all the promises of his speedy return literally, 
and lived in the hope that they might remain to the blessed 
moment, and not sleep but be changed. The Holy Ghost did 
not undeceive them to any considerable extent ; in one case, 
where the due balance of patience and hope had been in 
measure lost, express revelations of intervening events were 
given to restore that balance, but no periods were assigned to 
these events (2 Thess. ii.) ; the hope was left vivid as ever, if 
not quite so close at hand. But this hope was born of inexpe- 
rience; blessed and beautiful as it was, it was destined to wither 
away and be disappointed. The cold logic of facts proved it 
ill founded and mistaken, but did not render it the less sancti- 
fying and cheering : blessed be God, there is another kind of 
hope, born of patience and experience, and founded not on 
ignorance, but on knowledge. This hope dawned on the church, 
as the other sank beneath the horizon, and has gradually 
brightened ever since ; and it is a hope that shall " not make 
ashamed." Now it is clear, that had God revealed the duration 
of the long antichristian apostasy to the early church, they 
would at once have been deprived of their holy, happy, hope. 
What help or consolation could the sufferers and martyrs of 
early days have found, in gazing forward through well-nigh two 
thousand years of pagan and papal persecutions, of decay and 
death, and spiritual corruption ? The appalling prospect was 
in mercy hidden from their view, foreshortened almost to a 
point ; and the advent which was to close it all, was the grand 
object presented to their gaze. How could they have watched 
for an advent two thousand years off? what present practical 
influence could it have exerted over their lives ? Their igno- 
rance was evidently best for them, and God in mercy did not 
remove it. They held in their hands the prophecy, big with 



88 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

the mournful secret ; but they guessed not its burden, in their 
blissful and blameless ignorance they concluded that the " I 
come quickly " of their absent Lord, meant "quickly" according 
to human calculations. To leave them in their ignorance was 
the gracious purpose of God, and his motive was their comfort 
and sanctification. 

But it is equally clear that for us, believers of the nineteenth 
century, the case is reversed. A knowledge of the limits of the 
great antichristian apostasy, would not now deprive us of hope, 
but the very contrary : in fact we need some such revelation to 
sustain our faith and hope to the end of the long delay; without 
the chronological data afforded us by the prophecies of Daniel 
and John, we should be in a position of fearful temptation to 
doubt and despair. They were entirely ignorant of the length 
of the interval which we know to have occurred, and this know- 
ledge absolutely prevents the general promises of the nearness 
of the second advent, from having the same power over us that 
they had over them. Those statements cannot convey to us, 
after a lapse of well-nigh two thousand years, the impressions 
they conveyed to the primitive saints. They seemed to justify 
them in expecting the coming of Christ in their own day ; but 
each succeeding generation would have less and less ground 
for such an expectation ; and when the promise was already 
one thousand years old, who could avoid the reflection, " since 
it has included one thousand years it may include another " ? 
We, after nearly two thousand years, could not, as we read the 
promise, escape the conviction, that having already included 
two thousand years, it was perfectly possible that two thousand 
more were yet to come. Each century of delay would thus 
increase the heart-sickness of hope deferred, and the church 
of these last days, might well hang down her head in the sor- 
rowful but irresistible conviction, that her redemption might 
still be at an immeasurable distance ; she could have no well 
grounded hope that the Lord was in any strict sense " at hand." 

Now one generation of his saints is as dear to God as 
another ; we may be sure He did not secure the holiness and 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 89 

happiness of the early church, at the expense of ours, nor con- 
ceal what might be a blessing to us, because the knowledge 
might not have been a blessing to them. No ! He provided 
some better thing for us, than that we should float uncertainly on 
the stream of time, not knowing whether we were any nearer to 
the future than to the past advent of Christ. He revealed, but 
revealed in a mystery, all the main events of this dispensation, 
and nearly two-thirds of its duration ; He revealed them, in just 
such a way, as best to secure a renewal of hope that should give 
consolation, and revive in these last times a " patient waiting 
for Christ." Since continued ignorance of the true nature and 
length of this dispensation, as determined beforehand in the 
counsels of God, would have produced the very opposite effects 
designed by the permission of temporary ignorance, we have 
every reason to conclude, that God would in due time replace 
this latter by knowledge, and give a gradually increasing 
understanding of the inspired predictions. 

And if it be asked how this could be done, since inspira- 
tion has passed away and apostolic explanations can no longer 
be enjoyed, we reply, by the same means by which the in- 
terpretation of earlier prophecies was given to Peter, by their 
fulfilment before our eyes, and by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, 
enabling us so to discern the true nature of events, as to 
recognise the correspondence between them and the long familiar 
predictions. When the heart is docile, and the mind free from 
prejudice, a comparison of inspired prediction and historic 
fulfilment, is sufficient to show the relation between them ; to 
whatever extent prejudice exists, spiritual perception is blunted; 
where it reigns supreme, as in the case of the Jewish nation, 
" blindness in part has happened," and the ignorance being 
wilful, is necessarily a guilty ignorance, like that of Israel in 
apostolic days. Oh, how it behoves Christians to take heed, 
that they be not thus ignorant of the real meaning of apoca- 
lyptic prophecy ! 

Another observation may confirm our conviction, that it was 
the intention of God in the earlier parts of the Apocalypse, to 



9o PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

conceal for a time the real nature of the events, and the true 
length of the periods, therein revealed. The future, which for 
the sake of the early church required to be hidden under a 
veil of mystery, was of course only the future of this dispensa- 
tion. No prolonged interval was to be interposed between 
the church and her hope, — the return of her Lord ; but the 
same concealment was not requisite as regards subsequent 
events and their duration. If then the principle for which we 
contend be true, there will be found an air of mystery about 
the times and seasons mentioned prior to the advent vision, 
and an absence of it subsequently. This is exactly what 
exists. There are eight passages in the earlier part of the 
book, where periods of time, are named by phrases which are 
obviously uncommon, not the ordinary or natural mode of 
designating the period they seem to suggest, but all having 
an air of mystery. In the vision which immediately follows 
that of the advent, on the contrary, a period is six times over 
mentioned in the simplest possible form, " a thousand years." 
Why this difference ? The real length of this age of sin and 
suffering was to be hidden for a time ; but there was no need to 
hide the real length of the blessed age of purity, peace, and joy 
which is to succeed it. 

We conclude then, that since God has constantly acted on 
this principle, of gradually revealing the meaning of his own 
predictions, both in the Old and New Testaments, since we 
can see special reasons why He should do so, and a simple 
means by which He could do so, in this case, and since the 
construction of the book affords internal evidence of such an 
intention, that there is the strongest presumption that the 
meaning of the apocalyptic prophecies was designed to become 
clear to the church only by degrees. 

We conclude, that though the Apocalypse was not, like the 
visions of Daniel, to be supplemented by later revelations, and 
understood only in the light reflected back from these, yet it 
was to receive explanation from other sources, so that while it 
was a mystery in the early ages of the church, it should unfold 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 91 

its own meaning gradually, during the course of the dispensa- 
tion, and become increasingly clear and consequently increas- 
ingly precious, in the last days. 

We conclude also, that like Daniel's predictions and all other 
prophecy, it is not intended ever to become self-evidently clear, 
that even when understood by " the wise," its meaning will still 
be hidden from the world, and that consequently the true 
interpretation, whenever it shall arise, will have many adver- 
saries, and be rejected with contempt by " the wicked," even 
while it is being fulfilled before their eyes. 

These legitimate conclusions will lead us to expect the 
primitive interpretation of the premittennial visions of the Apo- 
calypse, to be the least correct ; though it might be, probably 
would be, right as to events subsequent to this dispensation. 
They prepare us to weigh with candour, the interpretations of 
later times, and forbid us to reject, on the ground of novelty, 
any view that attaches to these mysterious predictions a mean- 
ing worthy of Divine inspiration, and calculated to accomplish 
good in the church, even though it may have been unknown to 
the fathers, and even though it may be rejected and ridiculed 
by multitudes. These conclusions will lead us to expect the 
true interpretation to arise only after many many centuries of 
the church's history had rolled away, when the bright hope 
of early days had quite died out ; and to have the effect of 
quickening the church afresh to the patient waiting for Christ. 
But we should expect also that the true clue to the mysteries 
of the Apocalypse, once discovered, would not be immediately 
applied correctly ; so that -it would never practically have the 
effect of leading the church to think the Lord's return a very 
distant event, however much it might, theoretically considered, 
seem likely to do so. In other words, that God would not 
suddenly illuminate these predictions and so translate the church 
at a bound from perfect ignorance to perfect knowledge of the 
fore-appointed length and character of this dispensation ; but 
that He would enlighten her darkness gradually, by leaving a 
measure of obscurity till towards the close ; would allow her 



92 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

still, as at the first, to expect the great consummation long 
before its predestined date, and sustain her by revealing fresh 
grounds of hope, based on more accurate apprehension of the 
truth, as each erroneous anticipation was disappointed by the 
event. We shall consequently expect to find every generation 
of saints, after the true key to the book has once been found, 
making advances on the last, and the discrepancies existing be- 
tween their views will not stumble us, or lead us to reject them all 
as ungrounded. We shall trace the vein of truth growing wider 
and deeper ; we shall watch the ever brightening dawn of the 
true light ; and far from deeming this gradual discovery of the 
meaning of the apocalyptic prophecies, with its consequent 
inevitable discrepancies, a proof that they have no meaning, or 
none worth seeking, we shall accept it as a proof, of the pur- 
pose of God to act, still, as ever, on the principle of progressive 
revelation. 

Now on reviewing the history of apocalyptic interpretation 
we find that the early church were right in their interpretation 
of the visions which follow the second advent, they understood 
correctly, that which it was not the purpose of God to conceal 
from them. All the primitive expositors and teachers were pre- 
millemiialists. With the exception of Origen, who spiritualized 
everything, and of a few who denied the inspiration and 
apostolicity of the book, all the early fathers up to the time 
of Constantine, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, 
Hippolytus, Victorinus, Methodius, Lactantius, held that the 
first resurrection of Revelation xx. was a literal resurrec- 
tion, prior to a personal reign of Christ on earth. The ex- 
pectation of a spiritual millennium, to precede the coming of the 
Lord, grew up only in the more corrupt ages of the church, 
after her union with the world in the days of Constantine.* 

As to the previous predictive visions of the book, the 
numerous commentaries on the whole, and the almost in- 
numerable explanations of parts of it, which have appeared, 

* Elliott, " Heme," vol. iv., p. 306. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 93 

may be arranged in three distinct classes, which for conve- 
nience' sake have been denominated Preterist, Futurist, and 
Presentist schemes of interpretation ; each of these classes 
embraces a great variety of expositions, but the interpretations 
of each class have a fundamental resemblance to each other, 
and differ fundamentally from those of the other two. 

The first or Preterist scheme, considers these prophecies 
to have been fulfilled in the downfall of the Jewish nation and 
the old Roman empire, limiting their range thus to the first 
six centuries of the Christian era, and making Nero Antichrist. 

This scheme originated with the Jesuit Alcazar towards the 
end of the sixteenth century ; it has been held and taught 
under various modifications by Grotius, Hammond, Bossuet, 
Eichhorn and other German commentators, Moses Stuart, and 
Dr. Davidson. It has few supporters now, and need not be 
described more at length. Moses Stuart bases it on the denial 
of the very principle for which we are contending ; he takes it 
for granted that the writer had an " immediate object in view 
when he wrote the book," and that the original readers of tlie 
Apocalypse understood it; and argues that it must therefore 
treat of such matters as they could understand. But his only 
reason for this assertion is that he cannot conceive how " a 
sensible man" could' write a book "which would be unin- 
telligible to those to whom it was addressed ; " and he proceeds 
to admit that there is no evidence extant to show that the early 
Christians understood it. Further on he says that "very soon 
after this age, it was so interpreted that grave obstacles were 
raised to the reception of the book as canonical." And looking 
back from the end of the eighth century, after reviewing all the 
previous expositors of Revelation, he says " we find that no 
real and solid advances were yet made " towards a satisfactory 
explanation of the book. Thus he assumes that its first readers 
were intended to understand it, .and assumes that they did do 
so, while admitting that there is not the slightest proof to 
support either assumption, and that the light if ever possessed, 
was very quickly lost. His work evinces much learning but 



94 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

little spirituality, and treats the Apocalypse too much as a 
merely human production ; his views are happily not shared by 
many. 

The second or Presentist interpretation,.- is that historic 
Protestant view of these prophecies, which considers them to 
predict the great events to happen in the world and in the 
church, from St. John's time to the coming of the Lord ; which 
sees in the Church of Rome, and in the Papacy, the fulfilment 
of the prophecies of Babylon and of the Beast, and which inter- 
prets the times of the Apocalypse on the year-day system. 

This view originated about the eleventh century, with those 
who even then began to protest, against the growing corruptions 
of the Church of Rome. It grew among the Waldenses, Wick- 
liffites, and Hussites, into a consistent scheme of interpretation, 
and was embraced with enthusiasm and held with intense con- 
viction of its truth, by the Reformers of the sixteenth century. 
In their hands it became a powerful and formidable weapon, 
to attack and expose the mighty apostasy, with which they were 
called to do battle. From this time it spread with a rapidity 
that was astonishing, so that ere long it was received as a self 
evident and fundamental truth, among Protestant churches 
everywhere. It nerved the Reformers of England, France, 
Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, and Sweden, and animated 
the martyrs of Italy and Spain ; it decided the conscientious 
and timid adherents of the Papacy to cross the Rubicon, and 
separate from the so called Catholic Church ; and it has kept 
all the Reformed churches since, from attempting reunion with 
Rome. 

It was held and taught by Joachim Abbas, Walter Brute, 
Luther, Zwingle, Melanchthon, Calvin, and all the rest of the 
Reformers ; by Bullinger, Bale, and Foxe ; by Brightman and 
Mede, Sir Isaac and Bishop Newton, Vitringa, Daubuz and 
Whiston, as well as by Faber, Cunningham, Frere, Birks and 
Elliott ; no two of these may agree on all questions of minor 
detail, but they agree on the grand outline, and each one has 
added more or less to the strength and solidity of the system, 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION, 95 

by his researches. During the last seven centuries this system 
has been deepening its hold on the convictions of the Christian 
church, and has been embraced by some of her wisest and 
best guides and teachers. It originated with martyrs and con- 
fessors, exerted a sanctifying and strengthening influence over 
those who received it ; it tended to revive the hope of the 
premillennial coming of the Lord, which had long lain in abey- 
ance, leading naturally to many false anticipations of that event, 
which have been disproved by time, as well as to many very 
remarkable approximations to the truth, as to the time of othel 
events. It met of coiwse with intense and bitter opposition 
from the church it branded as Babylon, and the power it de- 
nounced as Antichrist, and to this day is rejected by all who 
in any way maintain or defend these, as well as by some who 
do neither. 

The third or Futurist view, is that which teaches that the pro 
phetic visions of Revelation, from chapters iv. to xix., prefigure 
events still wholly future and not to take place, till just at the 
close of this dispensation. It supposes " an instant plunge ot 
the apocalyptic prophecy, into the distant future of the con- 
summation. 5 ' * This view gives the literal Israel a large place in 
the Apocalypse, and expects a personal infidel Antichrist, who 
shall bitterly oppress the saints for three years and a half, near 
the date of the second advent, thus interpreting time as well as 
much else in the Apocalypse, literally. 

This view is, in a certain sense, the most ancient of the three. 
for the primitive fathers agree in several of these latter points. 
In its present form however it may be said to have originated 
at the end of the sixteenth century, with the Jesuit Ribera, who, 
moved like Alcazar, to relieve the Papacy from the terrible 
stigma cast upon it by the Protestant interpretation, tried to do 
so, by referring these prophecies to the distant future, instead 
of like Alcazar to the distant past. For a considerable period 
this view was confined to Romanists, and was refuted by several 

* Elliott, iv., 561. 



y 



96 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

masterly Protestant works. But of late years, since the com- 
mencement of this century, it has sprung up afresh, and sprung 
up strange to say among Protestants. It was revived by such 
writers as the two Maitlands, Burgh, Tyso, Dr. Todd, the 
leaders of the " Brethren " generally, and by some Puseyite 
expositors also. It is held thus by extreme parties ; by those 
who though Protestants, are ashamed of the Reformation, speak 
of it as an unwarrantable schism, and verge as closely on Rome 
as is possible ; and by those, who though Protestants, deem the 
glorious Reformation to have stopped grievously short of the 
mark, and see so much of Babylon still, in the Reformed 
churches, that they refuse to regard them as having come out 
of Babylon, or as victors over Antichrist. It is held under a 
greater variety of modifications than the other two, no two 
writers agreeing as to what the symbols do prefigure, but all 
agreeing that they do not prefigure anything that has ever 
yet taken place. 

Those who hold this view support it, among other arguments, 
by the authority of the primitive church. They say : "the fathers 
had apostolic tradition ; they had no controversial bias \ their 
opinion ought to have great weight; the historical interpret- 
ation was unknown in the church for one thousand years or 
more ; our view is the original view of the early Christians : 
They expected that Antichrist would be an individual man ; 
so do we. They expected him to be an infidel atheistic blas- 
phemer, not a Christian bishop ; so do we. They believed his 
tyranny would last three years and a half immediately prior to 
the coming of Christ ; so do we. They took the days, weeks, 
and months of the Apocalypse literally ; so do we." 

Now we readily admit this agreement (though indeed it is 
by no means so perfect as is implied*), and reply that herein 
lies a very strong presumption against the Futurist scheme. 
It is a return to that early interpretation of the prophecies, 
which was necessarily defective and erroneous, seeing it was not 

* See Elliott, " Horae Apocalypticse," vol. iv., p. 612. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETA7 ION. 97 

the purpose of God, to permit a premature comprehension of the 
7iature and length of this dispensation. It is a view which re- 
jects the light as to the purposes of God, which experience 
of the providence of God has afforded. It exalts the im- 
pressions of ignorance, above the ripe results of mature 
knowledge, and claims prestige for primitive views, on points 
where posterior views are necessarily preferable. It treats in- 
experience as wisdom, and despises as folly the 'wisdom 
acquired by eighteen hundred years' experience, of the most 
wonderful providential dealings of God. It recommends 
those who are of full age to return to the opinions of child- 
hood, forgetting that errors excusable in children are inex- 
cusable in men. The early church knew nothing of the mar- 
vellous ecclesiastical phenomena with which we are acquainted ; 
their ignorance of the true scope of the prophecy was unavoid- 
able ; we have seen the awful apostasy that has lorded it for 
more than twelve hundred years in the church of God ; similar 
ignorance in us is without excuse, for experience ought to 
teach. The Futurist view denies progressive revelation, and 
asserts that the early church understood the Apocalypse better 
than the church of after-times, which is contrary to the ana- 
logy of Scripture, and to the apparent purpose of God. 

Two main systems of interpretation of this final revelation 
of Scripture, are then before us : which is likely to be the true ? 
The one characterized the infancy of the church, the other was 
the offspring of mature experience: the one sprang up amid 
utter ignorance of the actual purpose of God ; the other in view 
of his accomplished providence : the one can never be brought 
to any test; the other at every point exposes itself to critical 
examination : the one was and is held by the apostate and perse- 
cuting church of Rome ; the other by multitudes of confessors 
and a glorious army of martyrs : the one leaves us to form our 
own opinion of the greatest fact in the history of the church, 
the papal system of ecclesiastical corruption and tyranny ; the 
other gives us God's infallible and awful judgment about it : the 
one was never more than a barren speculation ; the other has 

11 



98 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

been and is, a mighty power for good: the one leaves us in 
dismal doubt as to our place in the prophetic calendar ; the 
other makes us lift up our heads, to catch the glow of the 
coming sunrise. 

The presumption is surely against the modern revival of the 
primitive view. A return to primitive doctri?ie is good; no 
progressive revelation of the dogma of justification by faith, 
for instance, was to be expected ; innovation in questions of 
faith is condemned ; we are " earnestly to contend for the 
faith once delivered to the saints." But prophecy is not doctrine, 
and its very nature implies that it must be capable of receiving 
elucidation from the course of providence. The Protestant 
historical system of apocalyptic interpretation is based on this 
fact, and has consequently a strong presumption in its favour. 
But presumption is not proof ; and the question is of such im- 
portance that a fuller examination must now be attempted. 

Three main points require to be settled before we can hope to 
arrive at the meaning of the prophecies of the Revelation. 

i. Is the Apocalypse to be understood literally? and if not, 
on what principle is it to be interpreted ? 

2. Is it a fulfilled or partially fulfilled prophecy ? or does it 
refer to events still future ? 

3. Is it a Christian or a Jewish prophecy? That is, does it 
bear to the church, and to her fortunes in the world, the same 
relation that earlier prophecy bore to Israel, and to their 
fortunes in the world ? These questions will be considered, in 
the chapters which follow. 



CHAPTER II. 

CONSIDERATION OF CERTAIN BROAD PRINCIPLES, ON WHICH 
THE APOCALYPSE IS TO BE INTERPRETED. — IT IS A SYM- 
BOLIC PROPHECY, AND MUST BE TRANSLATED INTO ORDINARY 
LANGUAGE BEFORE IT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD. 

IT is clear that before a student can understand a given 
work, he must be acquainted with the language in which 
the book is written ; and he must read it as written in that 
language, not in another. If the work be in French, he will 
fail to decipher its meaning if he reads the words as Latin or 
as English. 

In what language is the Apocalypse written ? Is it to be 
understood literally ? If not, on what principle is it to be in- 
terpreted ? 

It is obvious to the most superficial reader, that in its actual 
texture and construction, the Apocalypse is a record of visions 
that are past. All allow that it is nevertheless, as to its mean- 
ing, a prophecy of events that are future^ or were future at the 
time that the visions were granted to St. John. The angel 
calls the book a prophecy, " seal not the sayings of the pro- 
phecy of this book, for the time is at hand." Of its prophetic 
character there can therefore be no more question, than that 
its form is a record of past visions. In the strictest sense then 
no one understands the book literally ; for the statement, " I 
saw a beast rise up out of the sea," taken literally, is in no 
sense whatever a prophecy ; it is a narrative of a past event, 
not a prediction of a future one. 

Such literalism as this is divinely excluded. John beheld 
things which were to take place " hereafter," but the future 
was signified to the apostle in a series of visions. 

The book is " The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God 



ioo PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

gave to Him, to show unto his servants things which must 
shortly come to pass ; and He sent and signified it by his 
angel, unto his servant John." 

To " signify " (cny/iaii/©) is to show by signs, to intimate your 
meaning, not in plain words, but by signs and symbols. 

Now it were clearly folly, to confound the sign with the thing 
signified. In a language of signs, each sign and each combina- 
tion of signs, has a definite meaning. The first verse of the 
book therefore answers our first question about it : is it to be 
understood literally ? No ! it is a book of signs. Its true 
meaning is veiled under significant figures, and a process of 
translation must take place, ere that true meaning can be 
reached. Each symbol used, must be separately studied, and 
its force gathered, from its context, from comparison with 
other scriptures, from its own nature, and from such explana- 
tions as are given in the prophecy itself, before we can expect 
to discover the mind of the Spirit of God in this book. 

If on opening a letter from a friend, the first sentence that 
met the eye was " I write in Latin in order that my letter may 
not be understood by all," we should at once be prepared to 
translate as we read ; we should not pore over a certain com- 
bination of letters and syllables, trying in vain to make some 
intelligible English word out of them ; we should say the word 
is so and so, but the meaning is so and so. In reading the 
symbolic portion of the Apocalypse, we are bound to do the 
same; on no other principle can anything like a consistent 
interpretation be attained. The nature of the case forbids it. 
And yet an opposite maxim of interpretation is often laid down ; 
it is said, take everything literally unless you are forced by 
impossibility in the nature of things, to give a symbolic signifi- 
cation. This is like saying, if you can find any combination 
of letters or syllables in this Latin letter, that will form any 
English word, take it as English, but where you cannot pos- 
sibly make anything out of them as English, then no doubt 
they are Latin. What a singularly lucid communication would 
be the result of such a system of interpretation ! And yet, 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 101 

alas ! it is in connection with the Apocalypse too common, 
among some, whose spirituality and intelligence ought to be 
fruitful of more wisdom. Such interpreters argue in defence 
of the monstrosities evoked by their hybrid system, somewhat 
in this way : " The Nile was once literally turned to blood, we 
doubt not therefore that this prediction, Revelation viii. 8, ' the 
third part of the sea became blood,' means just what it says ; 
God, who wrought the one miracle, can accomplish the other." 
Undoubtedly : the question is not what God can do, but what 
He here says He will do. Now Exodus is a literal history; 
when it says the river became blood it means it ; Revelation is 
a symbolic prophecy, when therefore it says " the third part of 
the sea became blood," it does not mean it, but it means some- 
thing entirely different ; and it is needful not only to substitute 
a future for a past time, but to translate these symbols into 
plain language, in order to ascertain what the meaning really is. 

It would be ludicrous, were it not painful, to contemplate 
the absurdities and inconsistencies, which have arisen from a 
neglect of this simple and almost self-evident maxim of inter- 
pretation, demanded by the opening verse of the book, as 
well as by its whole construction. To overlook it is to turn 
the most majestic and comprehensive prophecy in the Bible, 
into a chaos of vague monstrosities, unworthy of being attri- 
buted to inspiration ; it is "to degrade the highest and latest 
of God's holy revelations, into a grotesque patchwork of un- 
meaning prodigies."* 

Prophecy like science has its own peculiar language ; for 
understanding the prophecies, therefore, as Sir Isaac Newton justly 
observes, we are in the first place to acquaint ourselves with the 
figurative language of the prophets. " In the infancy of society 
ideas were more copious than words ; hence . . . men were 
obliged to employ the few words which they possessed, not only 
in their natural and direct sense, but likewise in an artificial 
and tropical sense. . . . Half civilized nations abound in 



* Birks. 



102 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

metaphor and allegory. . . . Why is it that a Cherokee 
warrior talks of burying the hatchet and of lighting the pipe ? 
. . His meagre language cannot supply him with the various 
terms, which the precision of modern diplomacy has rendered 
familiar to Europeans, and therefore he expresses the making 
of peace by allusion to certain well known ceremonies attend- 
ant upon it. . . . If such then of necessity was the language 
of defective civilization, such also would be the first rude at- 
tempt to express it in writing. The earliest manuscripts were 
neither more nor less than pictures, but these pictures closely 
followed the analogy of spoken language : . . . hence they 
were partly proper, and partly tropical. A member of a half 
civilized community, who wished to express to the eye the naked 
idea of a man, would rudely delineate the picture of a man, 
... a brave, and ferocious, and generous man, he was already 
accustomed to denominate a lion, if therefore he wished to ex- 
press such a man in writing, he would delineate a lion. . . . 
Nation bears to nation, the same relation, that individual bears 
to individual. Hence, according to their attributed character- 
istics, this nation would be the lion ; that would be the bear ; 
and that would be the tiger. . . . The general prevalence of 
the science of heraldry in all ages, under one modification or 
another, perpetuated and extended the form of speech to which 
it owed its origin. Thus the dove was the ancient banner of 
the Assyrian empire. . . . Such is the principle on which 
is built the figurative language of prophecy. Like the ancient 
hieroglyphics, and like those non-alphabetic characters which 
are derived from them, it is a language of ideas rather than of 
words. It speaks by pictures, quite as much as by sounds . . . 
Nor is this derogatory to the all-wise spirit of prophecy . . . 
when God deigns to converse with man, He must use the lan- 
guage of man. The Scriptures were designed for the whole 
world; hence it was meet, that their predictions should be couched 
in what may be termed a universal language. But the only 
universal language in existence, is the language of hieroglyphics. 
To understand this character, we have not the least occasion to 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 103 

understand the spoken language of the nation who uses it, . . . 
not being alphabetic it is the representative, not of words but 
of things. . . . Let the conventional mark be extended to the 
whole world, and we have forthwith a written universal language. 
Our common numerical cyphers, so far as they extend, form 
a universal language; for the figures 1 2 or 3 convey the 
same ideas to each person that uses them, by whatever different 
names the numbers themselves may be called. In the use of 
this language there is by no means that obscurity and uncer- 
tainty which some pretend. They might just as reasonably 
throw aside a Chinese inscription as incapable of being de- 
ciphered. Without a key neither can be understood, but 
when the key is procured, the book will very readily be 
opened. Now the key to the scriptural hieroglyphics, is fur* 
nished by Scripture itself, and when the import of each hiero- 
glyphic is thus ascertained, there is little difficulty in translating, 
as it were, a hieroglyphical prophecy, into the unfigured phraseo- 
logy of modern language. . . . When once it is known that 
a wild beast is the symbol of an idolatrous and persecuting 
empire, and when the empire intended, has been satisfactorily 
ascertained, it matters not whether this deed or that deed be 
verbally ascribed to the empire, or symbolically ascribed to 
the wild beast. Either mode of speech is equally intelligible. 
. . . In any case the elements of a language must be first 
learned, but when that has been accomplished, the rest will 
follow of course, whether the language in question be verbal or 
hieroglyphical. "* 

It is hardly needful to add that there are exceptions to this 
rule as to every other. Plain predictive sentences and literal 
explanatory clauses are interspersed here and there, amid the 
signs of this book. They stand out from the general text, as 
distinctly as a few words of English introduced here and there 
in a page of a Greek book would do ; it needs no signpost to 
say " adopt a literal interpretation here." They speak for them- 

* Faber's ''Sacred Calendar of Prophecy," vol. i., chap. i» 



104 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

selves, common sense dispenses with critical canons, and re- 
cognises them unaided. 

Any system of interpretation that violates this fundamental 
law of the book is thereby stamped as erroneous. The system 
that says : " Babylon means Babylon ; and the literal ancient 
Babylon will, we are bound to believe, be revived," must be 
false. In the Apocalypse, Babylon does not mean Babylon, 
nor Jerusalem Jerusalem, nor a Jew a Jew, nor the temple the 
temple ; the system therefore that says " all this Jewish 
imagery proves that the book has reference to the future of the 
Jewish nation, and not to the future of the church," must be 
false. All this Jewish imagery is symbolic; these things are 
used as signs. Everything connected with Israel was typical 
of things connected with the church. The things signified must 
therefore be Christian, otherwise the sign and the thing signi- 
fied, would be one and the same. The system that says the 
New Jerusalem is a literal city, 1500 miles square and 1500 
high (!), made of gems and gold, must he false; the New Jeru- 
salem is a sign ; the thing signified, is the glorified church of 
Christ, as comparison with other Scripture proves.* 

The Divine explanation attached to some of the earliest 
symbols employed in the book, furnish the key by which much 
of its sign-language is to be interpreted. They are to the sym- 
bology of the Apocalypse, what the Rosetta stone was to the 
hieroglyphics of Egypt. " The seven stars are the angels of 
the seven churches, and the seven candlesticks which thou 
sawest are the seven churches." The seven branched candle- 
stick, was one of the most important emblematic vessels in the 
tabernacle " which was a figure for the time then present " of 
spiritual realities. John saw seven separate candlesticks, and 
saw Christ the great High Priest, walking in their midst, like 



* "The application of symbols literally seems to me to be very false in 
principle, and a very unsuitable mode of interpretation. It is the denial 
that they are symbols. I believe the language of symbols to be as definite 
as any other, and always used in the same sense as much as language is." 
— J. N. Darby, <v Notes on Revelation," p. 31. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 105 

Aaron, trimming his lamps. He tells John what the emblem 
represents; the seven candlesticks symbolised the seven 
churches of Asia. This explanation authorizes us whenever we 
meet the same symbol of a candlestick, to attach to it the same 
signification ; and it does more. The candlestick was one 
feature of the tabernacle and temple economy, in which every 
feature was typical of heavenly things; many other symbols 
borrowed from the same system, appear in the Apocalypse : 
this one key unlocks them all. We have no right to say that the 
ark of the covenant, the altar, the sea of glass, the temple of 
the tabernacle of the testimony, the court, the holy city, the 
New Jerusalem, the priests and their garments, or the worship- 
pers, are to be taken literally. We are bound on the contrary 
to interpret them all on one harmonious principle. The seven 
candlesticks mean seven Christian churches, that is, they are a 
perfect representation of the Christian church. A Christian 
and not a Jewish sense, then, must attach to all the rest. The 
seven stars are not a part of the tabernacle system, but they 
are equally symbols, standing for a reality of an entirely 
different nature. Whatever the angels of the churches were, 
they were not stars ; and whenever we meet with this symbol 
in the book, we may be sure from the Lord's translation of it 
here, that it will not mean literal stars, but rulers, governors, 
chief men, messengers, or something analogous. " The seven 
stars are the angels of the seven churches." What sort of con- 
sistency would there be in the book, if a star in one place 
meant a ruler, and in the next a literal star ? Language used 
in so indeterminate and inexplicable a way, would cease to 
answer the purpose of language ; no definite meaning could 
attach to it. The study of the Apocalypse might well be 
abandoned, as more hopeless than that of the hieroglyphics, or 
the arrow-headed inscriptions of remotest antiquity ; for these 
we possess keys, for the Apocalypse none, if our Lord's own 
explanations are rejected as such. There is another indication 
of the same kind in the twice repeated expression, " which say 
they are Jews and are not, but do lie." The parties alluded 



io6 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

to, clearly were literal Jews, but being unbelievers, our Lord 
here denies to them the name, thereby taking from "Jew" 
thenceforth, its old literal meaning and confining it to a higher 
sense. " He is not a Jew which is one outwardly, neither is 
that circumcision which is outward in the flesh : but he is a 
Jew which is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the 
heart." These explanations and indications at the commence- 
ment of this prophecy, are like a Divine warning against the 
error of taking these Jewish emblems literally ; in the Apoca- 
lypse they must uniformly be interpreted as signs of other things. 

In every part of Scripture it is the spirit, and not the letter, 
that is life and light giving ; how especially must this be the 
case in a part where the letter, that is the outward form and 
expression of the truth, is so mysterious, so enigmatical, so 
unspiritual, as in the Apocalypse ? Popery has surely read the 
church of Christ a lesson, as to the danger of a false literalism; 
and yet if there be an apparently simple sentence in the Bible 
it is surely " this is my body." How can they who object to a 
literal interpretation of these words, consistently claim one for 
the strange supernatural symbolisms of the Apocalypse? " That 
literalism is to be renounced which involves a contradiction to 
the purified reason, or narrows and contracts the messages of 
God below the instincts of a holy and spiritual mind."* 

Another argument for the symbolic and Christian nature of 
this book may be drawn from the fact that it is written by 
John. A unity of character and style generally attaches to the 
different writings of the same author; and, subordinate to the 
higher unity of inspiration, this may be detected in the ratings 
of the New Testament. One who is familiar with the style of 
Paul, for instance, would find it hard to believe that any one 
else was the author of the epistle to the Hebrews ; and one 
who has entered into the peculiar matter and manner and 
spirit of John's gospel would, even were they anonymous, 
assign his three epistles to him. 



Birks, " Elements," p. 252. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 107 

They are characterized by the same selection of high and 
deep truth ; by the same spirituality and unearthliness ; by 
the same profound simplicity of style ; by the same massive 
divisions, which overlook all minor distinctions ; by the same 
unguarded breadth ot statement, which leaves aside qualifying 
limitations ; by the same marked, abrupt, contrasts ; by the 
same ignoring of the Jews, and disowning of everything Jewish, 
based on the great fact stated at the commencement of the 
gospel, " He came unto his own, and his own received Him 
not "; and by a recurrence of many of the very same ideas and 
forms of expression. It may safely be asserted that John, is 
the least Jewish and the least earthly of all the apostles, and of 
all the writers of the New Testament. 

The Apocalypse is written by this same John ; not only it 
claims to be so, and is proved by external evidence to be so, 
but it bears internal evidence of the fact. Though in very 
different connections, we meet with too many of the peculiar 
thoughts and expressions of John, to admit of any doubt as to 
the authorship of the book. " The Word of God," " the light," 
"a voice," "the Lamb of God," "the witnesses," the ascending 
and descending angels, the temple, the temple of his body, the 
living water, the shepherd leading the sheep ; these and many 
such points of resemblance, recall continually, that the apostle 
favoured to receive the Revelation of Jesus Christ, was " that 
disciple whom Jesus loved," and of whom He said, " if I will 
that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee ? " 

Now, if we take the Revelation as a symbolic prophecy, 
predicting the fortunes of the Christian church throughout this 
dispensation, it is harmonious with all the rest. The strange 
outward material symbols are only signs ; the things signified 
are mighty spiritual realities ; the book is one grand contrast 
throughout ; it traces the long and deadly conflict between the 
Lamb and the Beast, 6rjpiov and dpvlov, and their respective 
armies, between the whore associated with the Beast, and the 
bride of the Lamb, the false and faithless church, and the true 
and faithful church. In spite of all the Jewish symbolism, 



lo8 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

(which is natural from the typical character of the Jewish 
economy, and the antitypical character of the Christian) the 
Jews and their fortunes, are scarcely glanced at in the book ; 
which, starting from a period subsequent to the final destruction 
of Jerusalem, and to the dispersion of the Jews, occupies itself 
entirely, with the history of that church in which is neither Jew 
nor Gentile. The whole drama as it is enacted before us, 
recalls such words of John's earlier writings as, " ye are from 
beneath, I am from above "; " ye seek to kill Me "; " ye are of 
your father the devil "; the time cometh that whosoever killeth 
you will think that he doeth God service "; " in the world ye 
shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome 
the world"; "O righteous Father, the world hath not known 
Thee, but these have known Thee"; "art Thou a king then? 
for this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
world"; "behold your king"; "he is antichrist that denieth 
the Father and the Son "; " the world passeth away "; " it is 
the last time "; " when He shall appear we shall be like Him ", 
" for this purpose was the Son of God manifested, that Pie 
might destroy the works of the devil "; " boldness in the day 
of judgment, because as He is so are we in this world"; 
"this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith "; 
" he that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son 
of God hath not life." 

These and many other thoughts, familiar to us from the 
gospel and epistles of John, shine out with their old lustre in 
their new surroundings ; reading Revelation as a symbolic 
prophecy, we feel that it is as characteristic of the soaring, 
eagle eyed, spiritual apostle, as any of his writings. 

But if it be a record of mere material wonders to happen 
after the Christian church has been removed to heaven, in 
connection with a future Jewish remnant, how singularly unlike 
is it, to anything John was ever inspired to write ! What a 
rude and incomprehensible contrast, would exist between this 
and all his other productions ! 

And finally the principle of progressive revelation, demands 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 109 

that these visions should not be taken as literal predictions of 
a coming crisis at the end of the age. Other previous prophe- 
cies, had already brought down the chain of events to the 
destruction and fall of Jerusalem, and our Lord Himself in 
treating of it, passed on to the final crisis, of which it was a 
precursor. The one and only period, unillumined by prophetic 
light was the church's history on earth. Our Lord had revealed 
little, save its general character as a time of tribulation ; the 
other apostles had foretold certain events which were to 
characterize its course; it remained for the Revelation of Jesus 
Christ which God gave to Him, and which He now sends, as 
his last gift to the churches, to map it out in detail, and pre- 
sent in a mystic form, all its leading outlines. If the Apo- 
calypse merely went over again, the events of the final crisis, it 
would not be an advance on all previous revelation, as its place 
in the canon of Scripture warrants our concluding that it is. 
To be this, it must be a symbolical history of the Christian 
dispensation. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE APOCALYPSE IS A CONTINUOUS PROPHECY EXTENDING FROM 
-ITS OWN TIME, TO THE CONSUMMATION OF ALL THINGS. — IM- 
PORTANCE OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE, IN ORDER TO ITS 

CORRECT INTERPRETATION. IT IS A PROPHECY CONCERNING 

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, IN THE WORLD, 
AND NOT CONCERNING THOSE OF THE JEWISH NATION. 

VERY serious are the consequences of a refusal to admit 
uniformly and consistently, this symbolic character of the 
visions of the Apocalypse. Like most errors it brings further 
error in its train, and renders almost impossible any advance 
in the comprehension of the book. It answers beforehand, 
independently of investigation, the question whether the pro- 
phecies of the Apocalypse are fulfilled or not. It stands to 
reason, that if these emblematic visions are read under the im- 
pression that these things are to come to pass literally, the 
conclusion that the book consists entirely of unfulfilled prophe- 
cies is inevitable, for most assuredly no such things ever have 
come to pass. 

Literalists must therefore be futurists, and the abandonment 
of the first error, is almost certain to lead to the abandonment 
of the second. The moment we begin to translate the sym- 
bolic into ordinary language, the prediction assumes such a 
very different shape, that it is no longer a self-evident fact that 
it must be unfulfilled. The inquiry is on the contrary awakened, 
has this happened ? and we turn to history for an answer. If 
a fulfilment have taken place, we shall then be on the road 
to discover it ; one such fulfilment clearly established will be 
a clue to others ; and every fulfilment so discovered, will be 
an argument for the truth of that system of interpretation which 
led to the discovery. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. in 

Here we are met by an objection ; some are found rash 
enough to condemn that system of interpretation which leads 
to the comparison of prophecy with history, on the ground that 
it does so. The sun, say they, requires no candle to show that 
it shines ; the Bible requires no light from history • history is 
merely human ; we are told to search the Scriptures, but we 
are nowhere told to search Eusebius, or Gibbon, or Hallam. 
God is his own intrepreter ; He can explain his own word 
without human help ; history was not written in heaven, it is 
the wisdom of this world, foolishness with God, and so on. 

Now this reasoning, though often advanced in the most 
oracular way as if it settled the question, is shallow, and based 
on fallacies ; and yet, alas ! it misleads many, calculated as it is 
to natter ignorance, to foster indolence, and to encourage dog- 
matism, by throwing the reins on the neck of imagination, 
which is by it left free, to invent future facts and fulfilments, as 
it lists. A little reflection will show the superficial nature of 
the objection. 

A knowledge of history is needful to the intelligent compre- 
hension of prophecy. The Bible itself contains a large amount 
of history, from which alone we learn the fulfilment of many of 
its earlier prophecies, and without which we might still be ex- 
pecting a fulfilment, which took place hundreds of years ago. 
What are the four gospels, and the book of Acts, but histories, 
divinely inspired histories of course, but under the point of view 
we are now considering, their inspiration is mainly important as 
securing their accuracy and authenticity. They are authentic 
records of a series of facts, which took place eighteen hundred 
years ago, in a distant land ; for a knowledge of which conse- 
quently we must be indebted to the testimony of others. By the 
help of such testimony we compare the facts that have occurred, 
with the predictions of prophecy, and perceive the marvellous 
and accurate fulfilment. Without such testimony we never 
could have done this ; and to be ignorant of the existence and 
nature of such testimony, is to be practically without it. But 
Bible history, while it begins with the first Adam and the first 



112 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

paradise, does not, like Bible prophecy, reach on to the coming 
of the Second Adam in glory to re-establish paradise on earth. 
It ends about a.d. 60, and we have only uninspired though 
authentic records of all that has happened since. Now accord- 
ing to these objectors, we are not to make use of these ; not to 
compare New Testament prophecy with profane history. Either 
then there must be absolutely no prophetic light thrown by the 
Holy Ghost on the last eighteen hundred years, or else God does 
not intend us to have the benefit of it. Supposing a fulfilment 
clear as daylight to have taken place, we must remain in igno- 
rance of it, unless God were pleased now to add an appendix 
to the Bible, to record facts which many trustworthy historians 
have already recorded. Revelation never teaches things which 
common sense is sufficient to discover. For instance, a tenfold 
division of the Roman empire was predicted by Daniel, prior 
to the establishment of the kingdom of Christ on earth. 
The Roman empire was still existing in its integrity when 
John closed the canon of Scripture by his prophecy, which 
repeats the prediction. Blot out now all historical records, 
deprive the church of the help of all uninspired testimony, 
and Christians must to this day remain in ignorance of the 
solemnly momentous fact, that this prediction has been ful- 
filled during the last twelve hundred years, and the strong 
presumption to be derived therefrom that the coming of the 
Lord is nigh, even at the doors. Nor will it do to say, ah, but 
that is a notorious fact, evident to our senses without historical 
testimony. No : our knowledge of it depends upon uninspired 
testimony, historical or otherwise ; and the question is not, to 
what extent may we make use of uninspired records to elucidate 
inspired predictions, but, may we make use of them at all I 
The answer is clear, we must, or for ever remain ignorant, 
whether the holy prophecies of the word of God regarding post 
canonical events, are fulfilled or not. 

A still more rash assertion is also made ; it is said that no 
events of this parenthetical church dispensation (save those of 
its closing crisis) are, or could be, subjects of prophecy. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 113 

That this statement is not true is proved by the above 
instance, and by many more that might be alleged. But it is 
evident that a knowledge of history is needful to warrant the 
statement ! How without such knowledge, can it be ascer- 
tained that the visions of Revelation for instance, do not 
present a connected outline of the leading events between the 
past and future advents of Christ ? A knowledge of what has 
actually taken place is as needful to justify a denial, as an 
assertion of the fact. We must know a person as well before 
we can pronounce that a certain portrait does not reslmble 
him, as in order to assert that it does. 

This prejudice against the use of history in the interpreta- 
tion of prophecy, seems frequently to be based on a confusion 
which is made, between the facts recorded by historians and 
the opinions of the historians who record them. Grant that the 
latter being merely human are worthless, the former are none 
the less important. Trustworthy historians record events which 
//^neither invented nor caused, but which occurred under God's 
providential government ; it was He who caused or permitted 
these events ; they are in one sense as Divine, as prophecy ; 
that is, both proceed from Him. Prophecy is God telling us 
beforehand what shall happen ; authentic history is men telling 
us what has, in the providence of God, taken place. In truth 
each is best understood in the light of the other ; the moral 
features of events, occupy the main place in the prophecy, so 
that by its study we learn to weigh things in God's balances, 
to judge of men and systems by a Divine standard. But the 
history also elucidates the prophecy ; when we see what has 
been allowed to occur in fulfilment of a prediction, we learn 
what was intended in the announcement, and understand the 
perhaps previously mysterious form, in which it was made,- 
Apparent contradictions are reconciled, difficulties are re- 
moved, and we are filled with admiration and awe at the 
foreknowledge and wisdom evinced in predictions, over which 
the ignorant can only puzzle or speculate. Authentic history 
ought not to be deprecated as merely the wisdom of this 



114 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

world; it is something more, it is a record of God ; s pro- 
vidential government of the world. Besides it is vain and 
foolish to deny, that mental cultivation in general, an acquaint- 
ance with ancient languages and literature, with history and 
with science, are a help, in the understanding of Scripture 
and especially of prophetic Scripture. They are not needful 
to a spiritual apprehension of saving truth, thanks be to God, 
nor to growth in grace and in the experimental knowledge of 
the Lord. God can and does dispense with them, but He 
can and does also sanctify and use them, for the elucidation 
of his word. By themselves they are worthless, for they deal 
only with the letter; but, sanctified and used by the Holy 
Ghost, they are invaluable, as helping to explain the letter, in 
and through which we grasp the spirit. 

It is a strange estimate to form of the dignity of the in- 
spired book of the all-wise God, that those ignorant of his 
works in nature and providence, are as capable of understand- 
ing it, as those familiar with them. It is true that the un- 
learned Christian has, equally with the learned, the indwelling 
Spirit to guide him into all truth.- But it is also true that 
he needs in addition ministry, human teaching; else why 
has Christ given teachers to his church? Books are but 
written ministry. Ignorance is an infirmity, an unavoidable 
one with many it is true, and one for which help is provided ; 
but it is as much an infirmity of the mind, as blindness or 
lameness is of the body. We blame not the blind and the 
lame for not seeing and walking, but we should blame them 
for refusing the help of those who possess the powers of which 
they are deprived. We blame not the ignorant for their 
ignorance when it is unavoidable ; but we should blame them 
for refusing assistance, and for glorying in that ignorance as a 
peculiar advantage. The ignorant Christian must be indebted 
to the learned in many ways ; but for the labour of such, he 
would indeed have no Bible ; for what could he learn from the 
original text? and if the translation put info his hands be 
defective, how but from the criticisms of the learned, shall he 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 115 

remedy the defect ? This is surely designed of God, and is 
one of the ways in which "the whole body, compacted to- 
gether by that which every joint supplieth, according to the 
effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh in- 
crease of the body unto the edifying of itself in love." It is 
impossible to assign any reason, why the wisdom and knowledge 
derived from historical research, should not be made available, 
as well as every other kind of science, for the elucidation of 
Scripture. 

We dare not for these reasons exclude the light afforded 
by history, in the endeavour to answer the questions sug- 
gested above, is the prophecy of the Apocalypse fulfilled or partly 
so, or is it still entirely unfulfilled '? and is it in its general scope 
Christian or Jewish? The two inquiries are so closely re- 
lated, that it is impossible to pursue them apart ; it is 
evident that if the Revelation be partially fulfilled, it is in 
the history of the Christian church we shall be able to trace 
the fulfilment, seeing the Jewish nation was already cast 
away, — "broken off" for a time, — before this prophecy was 
published ; and it is equally evident that if it relate to the 
future history of restored Israel, no fulfilment can have yet 
commenced, seeing Israel is still scattered, and Jerusalem 
trodden down of the Gentiles. 

We have therefore to ascertain from the internal evidence of 
the prophecy itself, and from the external evidence of analogy 
and history, the truth as to these two closely connected points. 

And first what says the Apocalypse of itself? To whom is 
it addressed ? This is a fair and fundamental question ; it is 
thus that we judge of the object and scope of the epistles 
of the New Testament, and of the " burdens " of the ancient 
prophets. The epistles are addressed "to the saints and to the 
faithful in Christ Jesus," or " to the church " in such and such 
a place. Observing this, we argue, the Jews and the ungodly 
have no right to appropriate the contents of these letters; 
they are for believers in Christ alone ; confusion will result if 
unbelievers take to themselves these Divine messages. The 



n5 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

argument applies with equal force to the Apocalypse. It is 
addressed to Christ's "servants," "to the seven churches of 
Asia." This is reiterated ; the expressions occur both at the 
opening and at the close, of the book. "The Lord God of 
the holy prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants 
things which must shortly be done." " I Jesus have sent mine 
angel to testify unto you these things, in the churches." On 
reading these distinct declarations, simple unsophisticated 
minds would surely conclude, that the Jews and unbelievers 
in general, have no more to do with this prophecy than they 
have with the Epistle to the Ephesians. They may possibly 
be alluded to in the one, as in the other, but it is not for 
them, it is not mainly concerned with them ; it is for us ; 
Christians alone were Christ's servants in the days of Domitian, 
when John saw and heard these things ; to Christians alone 
was it sent, the seven churches represented the whole church, 
the prophecy is for the Christian church, and they take the 
children's bread to give it to outsiders, who would rob the 
church of her Lord's last gift. 

It is no use to say, yes ! but though given to the church, 
it might still be a revelation of the counsels of God about 
others than herself. 7/ might; the Epistle to the Ephesians 
might have been a treatise on the state and prospects of 
the lost ten tribes, but it was not; the vision of Nebuchad- 
nezzar, might have been a vision of the restoration of Israel, 
but it was not ; the visions of Daniel might have been visions 
of the seven churches in Asia, but they were not, nor was it 
likely that they would be, nor is it likely that the Lord Jesus 
in his last prophetic communication to his cherished church, 
from whom for eighteen hundred years He was to be hid- 
den, would have nothing more pressing, personal, and impor- 
tant to reveal to her, than the destiny of a future Jewish 
remnant, with which she has nothing in common, and the 
final judgments on a world, from which she is already de- 
livered, and from which, according to this theory, she will have 
been previously removed. Did she need no guidance, no 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 117 

comfort, no sustainment with the cordial of hope, for the years 
of earthly pilgrimage that lay before her? True, He had 
before, revealed in broad outline the sufferings that awaited 
her, and the glories that should follow ; but had He, who knows 
the end from the beginning, and who foresaw all that has 
since happened, no further words of warning and of cheer for 
his long-to-be-tempted, and sorely-to-be-persecuted church? 
Strange, that such an idea should find place in Christian 
hearts ! What ! shall our Lord be less kind and careful than 
an earthly friend or parent ? A father sends forth his young 
son into a world which he must face alone, into circumstances 
in which he cannot further communicate with him for some 
years ; he foresees that the separation will be far longer than 
the lad conceives, that his son will be exposed to temptations 
and snares, into which he will be only too prone to fall, 
that he will meet a crafty, specious, dangerous, deadly foe, 
in the guise of a friend, and that he will have to undergo 
sufferings that will be hard for him to bear, before he regains 
the paternal roof. He puts a long prophetic letter into his 
hand as they part, with solemn, earnest, repeated, injunctions 
to him to read and mark its contents. In distant lands and 
dreadful difficulties, the son opens this letter, and finds — suited 
advice and encouragement ? helpful warning and direction ? 
Oh no ! but an elaborate description of what his father intends 
to do for his younger brother, after his own return home ! 
What should we say of the wisdom or tenderness of such a 
parent ? Do these interpreters indeed believe that God inspired 
this prophecy, and that Christ loves his church ? 

Farther, what does the Apocalypse say about its own scope, 
and about the time to which it refers ? Again the first verse 
of the book supplies a simple and direct answer. It was given 
to show to Christ's servants " things that must shortly come to 
pass" and the next verse urges the study of the book, on the 
ground that "the time is at hand" In the last chapter the 
angel speaks of these things as " things that must shortly be 
done," and commands John not to seal the sayings of the pro- 



II 8 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

phecy, for the same reason, " the time k at hand" These 
words may measure time by the thousand-years-to-a-day scale, 
may not mean "at hand" according to human, but only according 
to Divine chronology. But it is not likely that this is the case, 
because in another closely related prophecy, we have expres- 
sions of an exactly opposite character, which can be proved to 
measure^ time by the ordinary standard. Daniel is twice or 
thrice told to shut up and seal certain parts of his prophecies, 
which related to events to take place in this dispensation, " even 
to the time of the end/' because "the time appointed was 
great" and "the vision for many days" Now the most dis- 
tant of those events was near if measured by the Divine scale, 
distant only according to the common computation. If these 
expressions in Daniel are used in their merely human sense, we 
have every reason to suppose that it is the same with the similar 
expressions in Revelation. To Daniel, Christ said, " shut up 
the words and seal the book even to the time of the end/' 
and to John, when these things had already begun to come to 
pass, the angel says, " seal not the sayings, for the time is at 
hand." It would not have been at hand in the ordinary sense, 
if the prophecy relates mainly to still future events. We have 
every reason therefore to believe, that it relates, on the contrary, 
to events that began soon after the apostle received the revela- 
tion, and that the fulfilment has been in progress ever since. 

Another strong presumption that the visions of the Apocalypse 
form a continuous prophecy, stretching over the whole of this 
dispensation, exists in their analogy with the prophecies of 
Daniel. The resemblance between these two is marked and 
close ; both are in the symbolic language, both were given to 
aged saints who were greatly beloved, who were confessors and 
all but martyrs ; the " Man clothed in linen and girded with 
the gold of Uphaz, whose face was as lightning, whose eyes 
were as fire, and whose voice was as the voice .of a multitude," 
who addressed Daniel, on the banks of the Hiddekel, is un- 
questionably the same Divine Being who addressed John in 
Patmos. The projjhecies were in both cases communicated 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 119 

when the temple was in ruins, and the Jews dispersed ; and 
both Daniel and John, had been trained in a school of pecu- 
liar experiences, to fit them to become recipients of these 
sacred revelations. We take then the symbolic prophecies of 
Daniel, as those likely to afford the most direct analogy to the 
symbolic prophecies of the Apocalypse, and we ask, do they 
date from contemporary events, or from a far distant future ? 
and do they present a continuous sketch of the interval they 
cover, or do they dwell exclusively on salient and distant 
crises ? 

The question scarcely needs a reply. The fourfold image 
seen by Nebuchadnezzar begins with the Babylonian monarchy 
of which he was the first great head. " Thou art this head of 
gold." It pursues its even course down through all the times 
of the Gentiles, and ends with the millennial kingdom of Christ. 

The second prophecy of Daniel, that of the four great beasts 
or empires, was given forty-nine years later, in the first year of 
Belshazzar, that is towards the end of Israel's captivity, when 
the days of Babylon's glory were fast drawing to a close, when 
the time was rapidly approaching for the kingdom to be num- 
bered, finished, divided, and given to others. Accordingly, 
while the first beast is still the Babylonian empire, the first 
particular noticed in the prophecy, is the plucking of the 
eagle's wings, on the lion's back. The prophecy thus starts 
from the diminished glory of the latter end of Babylon, rather 
than from the golden splendour of its commencement, that 
is, from contemporary events. It presents a second and fuller 
sketch of the political history of the Gentile world, (for the 
spiritual power, the little horn, is glanced at principally in its 
political aspects,) and traces the main features of the times 
of the Gentiles, down to the same point as its predecessor, the 
everlasting kingdom of the Most High. 

The third prophecy of Daniel, that of the ram and the he- 
goat, with its four horns and its little horn, was given, as its 
opening states, in the third year of Belshazzar. two years later 
than the preceding prophecy. It opens with the Medo-Per- 



T20 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

sian empire, and the conquests of Cyrus. Now when this pro- 
phecy was given, Cyrus had already been reigning seven years 
in Persia, and the rise of his universal empire was close at 
hand. It gives a continuous history of the Medo-Persian and 
Grecian empires, and of the Mohammedan politico-religious 
power, thus ranging from soon after its own date, to far on in 
the Christian era. 

The fourth prophecy of Daniel, that of the seventy weeks to 
elapse between the end of the captivity, and the coming of 
Messiah the Prince, began to be fulfilled about eighty years 
after it was delivered, when Artaxerxes gave the commandment 
to restore and to build Jerusalem. But the decree of Cyrus, 
to restore and build the temple, and to liberate the Jews from 
captivity, was promulgated only two years after the date of this 
prophecy, and would no doubt be taken by the Jews at first, as 
marking the commencement of the seventy weeks. This pro- 
phecy includes a period of about five hundred years, and reaches 
from the restoration under Nehemiah to the final destruction 
of Jerusalem by Titus. Its object was less to indicate inter- 
vening events, than to measure the period up to the great eve?it 
of human history ; the previous and the following prophecies, 
delineate the main outlines of the history of the period. 

And lastly the fifth and great closing prophecy of Daniel, 
given by our Lord Himself, and recorded in the nth and 12th 
chapters, begins with the date of the vision, " the third year of 
Cyrus king of Persia," and takes even a retrospective glance 
to the first year of Darius the Mede (chap. xi. 1). It pre- 
dicts the succession of the Persian monarchs, condensing into 
one sentence the reigns of Cambyses, Smerdis, and Darius 
Hystaspes, down to the overthrow of the rich and mighty 
Xerxes, who stirred up all against the realm of Grecia. It traces 
next the history of the Ptolemies and of the Seleucidae, down 
to the desolations and persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes , 
gives full detail of the career of the wilful king, and of the 
closing events of this dispensation, ending with the deliverance 
of Israel, and the resurrection of the just. It embraces thus a 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 121 

period of at least 2400 years, and extends from the fall of the 
typical, to the fall of the antitypical Babylon ; so that all the 
historical prophecies of Daniel start from events close at hand 
when they were given, and predict with varying degrees of 
fulness, a series of other events, to follow in regular sequence, 
to the point at which they close. 

Now, judging by analogy, we should expect that when He 
who revealed to Daniel the things noted in the Scripture of 
truth, came six hundred years later, to reveal to John " things 
that must shortly come to pass/' He would follow the same 
method. On opening the Apocalypse, this expectation is con- 
firmed ; we find that it starts, like all Daniel's prophecies, from 
"the things that are," and that it ends like them, with the 
great consummation. In the nature of things, it could not go 
over all the ground of the older prophecies. Many of the 
events foretold by Daniel had already transpired. The three 
great empires had risen and fallen; the fourth was then in its 
glory. Antiochus had desolated Judaea and defiled the temple ; 
Messiah had come, and had been cut off; Titus had destroyed 
Jerusalem. So much of the journey lay behind John in Patmos ; 
these facts were no longer themes for prophecy, but materials 
for history. Israel's fortunes were no longer the object of 
main interest, either to Him who was about to give this last of 
all prophecies, or to him who was about to receive it, or to 
those for whose sakes he was to write it. Blindness in part 
had happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles should 
be come in. The Apocalypse was not given in the sacred 
tongue of the Hebrews consequently, but in gentile Greek, 
just as Daniel's two earlier prophecies, which refer to the times 
of the Gentiles, without much allusion to Israel, are in gentile 
Chaldee. Taking these altered circumstances into account, 
what should we expect the last revelation granted to John in 
Patmos to contain ? Should we, judging by analogy, expect 
that, passing over in silence eighteen hundred years, crowded 
with events of deep interest, of stupendous importance to 
seventy or eighty generations of his saints, the Lord Jesus 



122 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

would reveal through this Christian apostle, only the par- 
ticulars of a brief closing crisis of earthly history, subsequent 
to the church's removal, and relating mainly to a future 
Jewish remnant ? Assuredly not \ We should expect this final 
prophecy, sent directly by Christ Himself to his church, 
through his most spiritually minded apostle, to contain an out- 
line of all that should befall that church, from the time then present, 
tmtil the Lord's return, with perhaps brief indications of subse- 
quent events. A first perusal of the prophetic part of the book, 
gives the impression that our expectation is correct. We find 
a series of symbolic visions, and we observe a perceptible 
correspondence between some of them, and some of Daniel's, 
exactly as would be the case supposing these visions to 
traverse the same ground as his later ones. We find in the 
Apocalypse no beasts answering to Daniel's first three, but the 
fourth reappears very prominently with his ten horns ; we find 
no periods corresponding to the seventy weeks or the 2300 
days, but the " time times and a half " is repeated in several 
forms, and in the same relative connection. We find in the 
closing visions, features that identify them with the final scenes 
of Daniel, and it is difficult to resist the conviction, that the 
intervening apocalyptic visions, must b e symbolic predictions of 
the moral and spiritual aspects, of all that has happened to the 
church of Christ, from John's day to the present time, and of 
all that shall happen, to the close. 

But analogy furnishes a stronger argument still. "The Old 
Testament, when rightly understood," says Augustine, " is one 
great prophecy of the New." The records of the past are 
pregnant with the germs of a corresponding but more exalted 
future. The history of the seed of Abraham after the flesh, 
is, throughout, typical of the history of his seed by faith. The 
Lord's dealings with them, were types of his dealings with us ; 
for every fact in their history, some counterpart may be noted 
in our own ; our experiences are but a new edition, on a differ- 
ent scale, of theirs. Now under the old covenant, prophecy 
tiiitw its light beforehand, on almost every event of importance 1 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 123 

that happened to the nation of Israel, from the days of Abra- 
ham to the days of Christ, the fall of Jerusalem and its temple, 
the dispersion of the Jews, and the end of that age. 

The light of prophecy is a privilege, a blessing, a gift ; it is 
always so spoken of in Scripture ; " He gave them prophets," 
" He gave gifts unto men, . . . apostles, prophets, evan- 
gelists, pastors, teachers"; and though Christianity possesses 
many higher privileges, and nobler gifts than Judaism, it lacks 
none of the real blessings of that earlier economy. We have 
exchanged many a shadow for substance, but lost no sub- 
stantial good. New Testament prophecy may therefore be 
expected to throw its light, on every event of importance to 
happen to the church of Christ, from the fall of Jerusalem to 
the second advent, that is, from the end of the Jewish, to the 
end of the Christian age. 

Among the events made subjects of prophecy in the Old 
Testament were the birth of Isaac, the rapid increase of Israel, 
the descent into Egypt, the sufferings of the Israelites- under 
the Pharaohs, the duration of their bondage, the exodus, the 
forty years in the desert, the possession of Canaan, its very 
division among the tribes ; the characters of Saul, David, Solo- 
mon, and many other individuals ; the building of the temple, 
the division of the kingdom into two, the Assyrian invasion, 
and Israel's captivity ; the Babylonian invasion and the seventy 
years' captivity of Judah, the return from Babylon, the time 
to elapse, and many of the events to occur, between it and 
the coming of Messiah the Prince, his birth, character, true 
nature, ministry, sufferings, and death ; the ministry of John the 
Baptist, the rejection of Israel, the call of the Gentiles, and 
the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus. 

Was Israel ever left during a long period, full of momentous 
changes, and events of solemn national importance, without the 
light and guidance of prophecy ? Is there in their history any 
" mighty unrepresented vacuum," of the occurrences of which 
we can say, great as are these events in human estimation, 
they are deemed unworthy of Divine notice in prophecy ? If 



124 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION 



such be the case there will be a distinct analogy, on which to 
base the theory, that the Apocalypse is still wholly unfulfilled. 
But such is not the case. The chain is almost unbroken, and 
though four hundred years elapsed between the last of the 
prophets and the coming of Messiah, Daniel's prophecy fills in 
the events of the interval, so that no gap of even a century 
occurs in the long series. 

Is it likely that there should be no analogy, but a perfect 
contrast, in the history of the antitypical Israel ? Has she no 
Egypt to leave and no wilderness to traverse, no land to inherit, 
no oppressors to tyrannize over her, no evil kings to mislead her, 
no reformers and deliverers to arise, no Babylon to carry her 
captive, no temple to rebuild, no Messiah to look for, no 
judgments to apprehend, no rest to inherit ? Are hers less im- 
portant than theirs ? Are her foes so much more obvious, her 
dangers so much more patent, that it should be superfluous to 
supply her with prophetic light to detect them ? Because they 
were an earthly people, and she a heavenly church, is she 
therefore not on earth, and not amid the ungodly ? Are her 
enemies heavenly because the church is so ? Nay, but most 
earthly, for the wicked spirits against whom the church 
wrestles, wage their warfare incarnate in earthly, sensual, devilish 
systems, and in actual men, as did Satan in the serpent in 
Eden. Every conceivable reason would suggest her greater 
need of prophetic light. Now the Apocalypse is the book of 
the New Testament which answers to "the prophets" of the 
Old. If then it contain predictions of the first spread of 
Christianity, of the hosts of martyrs who sealed their testi- 
mony with their blood, during the ten pagan persecutions, of 
the reception of Christianity by Constantine and the Roman 
empire, of the gradual growth of corruption in the church, 
of the irruptions of the Goths and Vandals, and the break up 
of the old Roman empire into ten kingdoms, of the rise and 
development of popery, of the rise and rapid conquests of 
Mohammedanism, of the long continued and tremendous 
sufferings of the church under papal persecutions, of the fifty 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 125 

millions of martyrs slain by the Romish Church, of the 
enormous political power attained by the popes, of their 
Satanic craft and wickedness, of the Reformation, of the gradual 
decay of the papal system and the extinction of the tem- 
poral power of the popes : if it contain predictions of these 
eve?its, which we know to have take?i place in the history of the 
antitypical Israel, then we have a perfect analogy with the Old 
Testament. If on the other hand, the Apocalypse alludes to 
none of these events, but passing them all over in silence, 
gives only the history of an Antichrist who has not yet 
appeared, and of judgments not yet commenced, nor to be 
commenced until the church is in heaven, then instead of a 
striking scriptural analogy, we have a glaring and most un- 
accountable contrast. 

We say advisedly unaccountable, for none of the reasons 
assigned for this supposed contrast between Israel's experience 
and our own in this matter, are satisfactory. Their calling was 
an earthly one, ours is a heavenly one, it is true ; nevertheless 
our calling from heaven, and to heaven, leaves us still on earth. 
We have earthly connections and relations ; we are not of the 
world, but we are in the world. The acts of earthly monarchs 
and the changes of kingdoms and dynasties, affect the church 
even as they affected her Lord, in the days of his flesh. How 
came the prophecies " I called my Son out of Egypt," and 
" He shall be called a Nazarene," to be accomplished ? What 
took the virgin mother to Bethlehem? Why was Paul left 
bound two whole years ? Secular political events have their 
influence, their mighty influence, on the church, notwithstanding 
her heavenly calling, and may therefore well be revealed to her 
by the spirit of prophecy. It is evident there is nothing in the 
peculiarity of this dispensation, which precludes the church 
from receiving predictions, of specific events to take place 
during its course, because the epistles contain such predictions. 
The fact that the Holy Ghost has announced to the church, 
events reaching through the whole dispensation cannot be 
denied. " He who now letteth will let until he be taken out 



126 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

of the way ; and then shall that wicked be revealed, whom the 
Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall 
destroy with the brightness of his coming." The hindering 
obstacle, whatever it was, was in existence when the apostle 
wrote, and was to continue in existence until another event took 
place, the rise of the man of sin, and that wicked one was to 
continue till the Lord's coming. Here we have a prophecy the 
fulfilment of which, starting from its own date, reaches to the 
consummation, and covers the whole interval, leaving no room 
for a break. 

There is therefore no ground for asserting,' that the fulfil- 
ment of the Apocalypse must be future, because the church 
cannot be the subject of prophecies whose sphere is earth. If 
she may be the subject of one or two, she may equally 
well be the subject of a hundred, and the question must 
be decided on other grounds. If the first generation of 
Christians were forewarned of the fall of Jerusalem, we may be 
forewarned of the fall of Babylon. If they knew beforehand 
that Jerusalem was to be compassed about with armies, we 
may know that the power of Turkey is to decay. In prin- 
ciple there is no difference ; a dispensation that admits of the 
one, admits also of the other. 

The interpretation of this book which asserts a past historic 
fulfilment of the greater part of its mystic visions, is then in 
perfect harmony with strong scriptural analogies; and the 
interpretation which asserts them all to be future and unful- 
filled, is in violent and unnatural opposition to all analogy 
and would require the strongest internal evidence to suppoit 
it. But such internal evidence it can never receive, seeing it 
is a negative, and not a positive theory ; it denies the historic 
fulfilment, but substitutes no other that can be tested by its 
correspondence or otherwise with the terms of the prediction. 
Internal evidence in its favour is therefore impossible ; there 
is no analogy to support it ; and we are driven to the conclu- 
sion that it is untenable. 

The principal test, however, by which to determine the 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 127 

period covered by this prophecy is a comparison with history. 
Can any series of events be indicated, which have transpired 
since the Christian era, which bear a sufficiently clear resem- 
blance to the symbolic visions of the Apocalypse, to justify the 
assertion, that the prophecy is for the most part a fulfilled one ? 
If so, candour would admit, that it settles the question. 

We firmly believe that such a fulfilment is clearly traceable. 
Yet as Jewish unbelief refuses to perceive that the character 
and mission, the life and death, of Jesus of Nazareth, fulfil 
the long series of Messianic predictions, so there may be a 
Christian unbelief, which refuses to perceive, that the events of 
the Christian era, answer to the predictions of this Christian 
prophecy. 

Yet if such a series of events have taken place, it ought not to 
be difficult to observe the resemblance between the history and 
the prophecy. It is not a question of minor details, but of 
events of stupendous magnitude, affecting a vast extent of the 
earth, and reaching through centuries of time. It is not a 
question of remote antiquity, nor of half explored, dimly known 
regions; no such difficulties encumber the problem. The 
things that have transpired in the Roman earth, since the days 
of Domitian, when the Apocalypse was written, especially those 
concerning the Christian church, both true and false, and those 
transpiring in our own day, are not things done in a corner, 
concerning which there may exist a great variety of opinions 
and of questions that can never be decided. On the contrary, 
we have records abundant and varied enough of the whole 
period, to enable us to live it over again in imagination : and 
we have rem^ms, and monuments, and present facts, which are 
so linked with all that eventful past, that no ingenuity can 
distort or deny, any of its main features. The last eighteen hun- 
dred years, present no terra incognita to the historian ; explorers 
may not conjure up characters, or concoct transactions, to suit 
their taste ; dates cannot be adapted to fit theories ; every error 
is sure to be detected, and every assertion sifted. Very narrow 
are the limits within which invention may act ; almost boundless 



123 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

is the field for examination and research. This being the case, 
it must be not only possible, but easy, to recognise the fulfil- 
ment of the apocalyptic prophecies if it exist, provided only 
we are sufficiently acquainted with the facts of history, and 
rightly understand the predictions themselves. 

If a photograph of an extensive and varied landscape, be 
presented to a person familiar with the scene, he will not fail to 
recognise its main features ; he might not be immediately able 
to detect the miniature of his own homestead, amid the many 
similar to it, nor to identify every spire of the neighbouring 
city, and every little detail of the picture. But the more he 
studies it, the more he will see in it, and the microscope will 
enable him to identify objects, which one without a microscope 
and with less knowledge of the neighbourhood, would never 
notice. It is thus with a student of the Apocalypse who is 
familiar with history. Or, to reverse the simile ; one who has 
long being acquainted with a series of photographs, say of the 
Holy Land, who has pored over them with loving interest and 
impressed them deep in his memory, is transported to Palestine, 
and wanders amid those very scenes. He stands on the shores 
of a blue lake which reflects a snowy cone that rises far away 
to the north ; the level tops of a range of barren mountains 
stretch along the opposite shore ; a ruined, earthquake-shaken 
town and castle lie behind him ; and away to the south a river 
makes its way out of the lake. He needs no guide to tell him 
where he is ; he stops not to observe the details of the scene ; 
this combination of broad features so often noted in the 
photograph is enough : " Hermon," he exclaims " that exceed- 
ing high mountain apart ! Tiberias, solitary survivor of sister 
cities ! mountains of Bash an, river Jordan, I know ye all " ; 
and he would smile incredulously at any one who should say, 
" Well, in spite of the general resemblance, I question after all 
whether this is the sea of Galilee ! " 

It is thus with a student of history who is familiar with the 
Apocalypse. The remembered photograph serves to identify 
the real scene, as in the former case the well remembered 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 129 

scene interpreted the picture ; if there be a resemblance it would 
be impossible that either could be known, and the other not 
recognised, if contemplated with sufficient care and attention. 

The reason that the resemblance is not more uniformly 
perceived, between the predictions of Revelation and the facts 
of history since the Christian era, must then lie, either in a 
want of thorough acquaintance with one or other, or else in a 
want of careful and unprejudiced attention to the correspond- 
ence between them. Those who have taken the Apocalypse 
literally, have of course little idea what it predicts when 
translated into unsymbolic language ; and history is too often 
contemplated, from the worldly political point of view in which 
it is generally written, for the resemblance between the Divine 
delineation of its facts, and the facts themselves, to be easily 
recognised. 

Besides this, a foregone conclusion that the book of Revela- 
tion is unfulfilled, prevents many from perceiving the proofs to 
the contrary. But we feel no hesitation in asserting, that a 
candid student, who admits the Apocalypse to be symbolic, 
and patiently endeavours by the help of other Scripture to 
translate its symbols, and who then proceeds to compare its 
predictions, with the authentic historical records of the Chris- 
tian era, will be driven to admit, that there is as clear a 
correspondence between the two, as between any other 
prophecy and its fulfilment. 

We cannot enlarge on this argument here ; to do it justice 
would be to give an exposition of the greater part of the book. 
The correspondence will be traced somewhat fully as to one or 
two of the visions, in the third part of this work ; and any force 
of truth therein perceived, must be allowed to lend its aid in 
deciding our present point, the general principles on which the 
book ought to be interpreted. We entreat the Futurist reader to 
remember, that it is possible for the plainest and most satis- 
factory fulfilment of a prophecy, to be forced on the attention, 
and yet be unperceived : witness the Jews in the days of Christ; 
witness the disciples by the empty sepulchre. And yet if 



T30 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

a fulfilment of the Apocalypse has been accomplishing for 
more than seventeen hundred years, and if there remains very 
little now to be fulfilled, it is of momentous interest to the 
church of Christ that she should be aware of the fact. If in 
watching an exhibition of dissolving views we judge of the 
nearness of the conclusion, merely by the time that has 
elapsed since it began, we may have a vague impression that 
the end cannot be far off; but if we have held a programme 
of the proceedings in our hand all the time, and have ob- 
served that each scene appeared as announced, and that 
only the final one remains, we have a certainty that the end 
must be close at hand, which is a very different state of mind. 

A Divine programme of the proceedings of this dispensation 
has been placed in our hands ; they who avail themselves of 
it, they who study it, and watch the dissolving views presented 
on the stage of history, know how many of the pre-appointed 
configurations have appeared, melted away, and been replaced 
by others ; they know the position on the programme of the 
one now on the stage, and they know what remains ! They 
lift up their heads, they know that their redemption draweth 
nigh, yea very, very nigh ! 

Nor are the claims of this principle of historical interpreta- 
tion in the least invalidated by the fact, that interpreters differ 
among themselves as to the precise application of some of the 
visions. ■ Nearly all the writers of the first fifteen centuries of 
the Christian era, entertained the view that the Apocalypse 
was a comprehensive prophecy, reaching from the date of its 
publication to the end of all things, and endeavoured conse- 
quently to find its historical solution. It can be no wonder 
that, as the page of history has unrolled itself, greater accuracy 
should have been attained, than it was possible for early 
students to possess. At the time of the Reformation, and 
subsequently, the great body of commentators still interpreted 
the Apocalypse on the same principle, but naturally with a far 
closer approximation to the truth, though they were by no means 
unanimous in their expositions of detail j and many are the 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 131 

points of controversy which still exist. But the essential 
agreement, more than counterbalances the minor differences,* 
and it would be strange indeed if such differences did not 
exist. 

Prophetic interpretation is not milk for babes, but rather 
strong meat for those that are of full age, and have their senses 
exercised by reason of use. But which of the very simplest 
doctrines of Scripture excludes controversy ? Is it an argument 
against the true view of the atonement, that numerous erroneous 



* We extract the following note from an admirable little pamphlet by 
P. H. Gosse, F.R.S., entitled, "The Revelation : How is it to be In- 
terpreted ? " (London : Morgan and Chase, 23, Warwick Lane, Paternoster 
Row) which we earnestly commend to the consideration of those who hold 
Futurist views. ' ' The following list of Presentist expositors of the Apo- 
calypse includes, so far as I have been able to ascertain, all of any note 
from the era of the Reformation to the publication of the ' Horse ' of Mr. 
Elliott: Luther, Bullinger, Bale, Chytraeus, Marlorat, Foxe, Brightman, 
Pareus, Mede, Vitringa, Daubuz, Sir Isaac Newton, Whiston, Bengel, 
Bishop Newton, Bicheno, Faber, Frere, Irving, Cunningham, Habershon, 
Bickersteth, Birks, Woodhouse, Keith, Elliott, twenty -six in all. Out of 
these there are agreed as follows : 

1. That seals I. to IV. are the decline of the pagan empire ... 10 

2. That seal VI. is the fall of paganism under Constantine . «, . 1 1 

3. That trumpets I. to IV. are the Gothic invasions 15 

4. That trumpet V. is the Saracens 17 

5. That trumpet VI. is the Turks 21 

6. That the little opened book refers to the Reformation . ... 12 

7. That chapter xi. is the papal persecution of saints as heretics . 22 

8. That chapter xii. is the depression and recession from view of 

the true church during the papal ages 18 

9. That the beasts are aspects of the Papacy 25 

10. That the vials are the great French revolution and its results . 8 

11. That chapter xvii. is Rome 26 

12. That chapter xviii. is the Papacy 26 

13. That a day is the symbol of a year 19 

It is right to observe that, the first four seals and first four trumpets 
referring each to several things, the agreement must be understood as 
admitting some diversity in details. Also that the application to the 
French revolution of the vials, could not possibly be made by expositors 
who wrote before the close of the last century, that is more than half of 
the whole number. Sir Isaac Newton and Whiston, however, shrewdly 
foresaw the great infidel revolution, as the earthquake of the seventh 
trumpet, " that infidelity was to break in pieces the antichristian party 
which had so long corrupted Christianity." (Whiston, p. 46.) 



• 32 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

and defective views exist? Is there no revealed truth on 
the subject of church government, because such widely differ- 
ing creeds on the point, prevail ? If we cannot see eye to 
eye on such subjects as these, shall we marvel that differences 
appear in the application of the symbolic visions of Revelation 
to history ? The multitude of the events predicted, their range 
and variety, the peculiar language in which they are foretold, 
the fact that they bear a strong testimony against existing cor- 
ruptions in the church, and consequently enlist the antagonism 
of all who uphold these corruptions, these things are quite suffi- 
cient to account for the measure of disagreement, which is 
found among interpreters, and which decreases in proportion 
as acquaintance with the subject increases, and as every fresh 
phase of contemporary history, adds its testimony to the pre- 
viously existing mass. 

But it is needful to notice one or two objections, com- 
monly advanced by a certain school of Futurist interpreters, 
who hold very strongly the parenthetical character of the pre- 
sent dispensation ; because they appear to have more weight 
than on examination they prove to possess. They settle the 
question as to the character of the Book of Revelation, in a 
summary and apparently conclusive way, but in reality on 
superficial and unsubstantial grounds. The first is a sort of 
attempt to prove an alibi on behalf of the church : " the church 
cannot be in any way the subject of the prophetic visions of 
Revelation (chapter vi. — xix.) because she is already seen in 
heaven in the two previous chapters. All that happens after 
chapter v. is subsequent to the rapture of the church ; it must 
therefore refer to the Jewish remnant." " The church is never 
seen on earth, or anywhere but in heaven, from the end of 
chapter hi. till in chapter xix. Christ comes forth from heaven, 
and the armies which were in heaven follow in his train." * 

Fully admitting that the four-and-twenty elders and the 
cherubim of Revelation iv., v., include the church, we hold, 

* " Eight Lectures on Prophecy." W. T. 3rd edition, p. 192. 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 133 

that it would be a sufficient answer to this objection to say, part 
of the church are seen in heaven, while part are still repre- 
sented as suffering on earth ; or to say " He hath raised us up 
together, and made us sit together, in heavenly places in Christ" 
even now, while we still groan, and fight, and toil, and die, on 
earth. But the chapters themselves supply a more conclusive 
answer. The church is not only seen in heaven, but she is 
seen taking part in the action of the beautiful introductory 
episode of this Divine drama. What is that action ? It is 
the taking and opening by the Lamb, of the seven sealed book. 
This acti<m took place while John was an exile in Patmos ; for 
ever since, the mysteries hidden under those seven seals have 
been discovered and published to the world. 

Clearly the book is not now shut and sealed ; for we know 
its contents ; each seal covered or contained a vision, not be it 
observed the fulfilmeiit of a vision, but the vision itself. The 
visions were not seen till the seals were broken, and the seals 
were not broken till the Lamb took the book. But the visions 
were seen eighteen hundred years ago ; therefore the Lamb 
took the book and broke the seals thereof, eighteen hundred 
years ago ; that is, the scene in which the church is represented 
as taking part in heaven occurred eighteen -hundred years ago. 
But the church was not actually in heaven eighteen hundred 
years ago, and therefore there is no ground for the assertion 
that the church will be actually in heaven before the events 
symbolised in chapters vi. to xix. take place. The church was 
in heaven, in the only sense i7i which she will be there till the 
marriage of the Lamb shall come, when John was in Patmos. 
In other words the Apocalypse represents the church as mystic- 
ally in heaven, while still actually on earth, even as Ephesians 
ii., Philippians iii., and other scriptures do. 

So, while we gladly grant to our Futurist brethren, that a 
portion of the church is represented as in heaven, in chapters 
iv., v., we ask them to grant with equal candour that a portion 
is represented on earth in the subsequent chapters. The one 
is just as evident as the other; and to deny it is both to destroy 



134 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

the dramatic unity so markedly stamped on this prophecy, and 
to obscure one of its grandest lessons. 

The prophecy is addressed, as we have seen, to Chrisfs 
servants and to the churches ; the ascription of praise in chap, 
i. 5 is evidently Christian praise, it is the praise of those who 
have been loved by Jesus, and washed from their sins in his 
blood. John speaks of himself as the brother, and fellow 
sufferer of those to whom he wrote, and John was a Christian 
confessor, a prisoner of Jesus Christ in Patmos, as much as Paul 
had been in Rome. He says he was in exile "for the word of 
God, and for the testimony which he held," which expression 
therefore means Christianity. Under the fifth seal we catcK a 
glimpse of a company of martyrs who were slain " for the word 
of God and for the testimony which they held," that is, for con- 
fessing their Christian faith, like John; they were slain because 
they were Christians. White robes are given to them, and 
they are told to wait till another company of martyrs should 
be killed as they were, that is as Christians. In chapter vii. 
we have presented to us a company in heaven, unquestionably 
Christians also, for they are gathered out of every nation, 
kindred, and tongue, and they have washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the Lamb. In chapter viii. 
" the prayers of all saints " and " the prayers of the saints " 
are mentioned ; now prayer ascends from suppliants on earth, 
and "saints " in New Testament phraseology means Christians. 
We have no right in the last book of the New Testament to 
revert to an Old Testament signification of this word. Let 
the general tone of John's gospel and epistles be recalled, and 
his choice of this word to designate true Christians, in the 
midst of an ungodly world and falsely professing church, will 
be felt to be in beautiful harmony. What is the grand dis- 
tinction made in John's epistles between true Christians and 
those who are not ? It is holiness, saints hip. "If we say we 
have fellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do 
not the truth ; but if we walk in the light, we have fellowship one 
with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 135 

us from all sin." " These things write I unto you, that ye sin 
not" "Every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him." 
" Every man that hath this hope in Him, purifieth himself even 
as He is pure." " Whosoever abideth in Him, sinneth not." 
" Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin." " In this the 
children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil : 
whosoever doeth not righteousness, is not of God." " This is 
the love of God, that we keep his commandments." " What- 
soever is born of God sinneth not." " We know that we are of 
God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness." " He that 
doeth good is of God, but he that doeth evil hath not seen God." 

Such language shows that in the eyes of John, practical 
purity and holiness, saint/mess, is the grand characteristic oC 
Christians. When therefore we find /rim, consistently desig- 
nating a certain body, by the distinctive appellation of " the 
saints," we conclude that those so called are true Christians, 
in opposition to the ungodly, or to false professors. Where does 
John, ever apply such a term to Jews ? Where in the whoie 
New Testament can the term be found so applied ? Why 
then should we assert that it is applied to Jews here ? Paul 
uses it forty-three times, and in every case as a synonym for 
Christians. Luke uses it four times, in the Acts, and Jude twice 
in his epistle, in the same sense ; in fact only once is it used in 
any equivocal sense in the whole New Testament. (" Many 
bodies of the saints which slept arose." Matt, xxvii. 52.) 

Besides, we observe these " saints," who are thirteen times 
mentioned in the Apocalypse, doing and bearing exactly what 
we know from other scriptures, the saints of the Christian church 
must do and bear in this dispensation. We find them watch- 
ing, waiting, praying, enduring "tribulation (chap. xiii. 10), re- 
sisting unto blood (chap. xvi. 6), resting in heaven (chap. xiv. 
12, 13), and at last manifested as the bride of Christ, and as 
the " armies which were in heaven," clad under both emblems 
with the " fine linen clean and white, which is the righteousness 
of saints " ; we find them associated with the martyrs of 'Jesus, 
(chap. xvii. 6), a clear proof that they cannot be Jewish saints. 



136 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 

In short, so far from the church being actually and exclu- 
sively in heaven, at the commencement of the prophetic drama 
of this book, she is see7i on earth during its entire course. She is 
seen collectively under various symbols, such as the one hun- 
dred and forty-four thousand, the two witnesses, the sun-clad 
woman, the armies of heaven, the New Jerusalem; and her 
members are seen severally as " the saints." They are seen first 
in their sufferings, and then in their glory; first slain for Jesus' 
sake, then enthroned beside Him. Can it be questioned that 
the saints who pray, and wait, and suffer, and die as martyrs of 
Jesus, are the same saints, the " called, and chosen, and faithful/' 
who are seen with the Lamb afterwards, as his bride, and as 
his white-robed followers ? If they are not, the unity of the 
book is gone, it becomes an incomprehensible confusion. If 
the saints who form the bride of the Lamb in chap, xix., are 
not the saints who in the previous chapters witnessed for Him 
in life and in death, then the lesson written most legibly on the 
pages of the prophecy, — the lesson that, in spite of ignorance 
and obscurity, the church in all ages has learned from it, — the 
truth that sustained millions of martyrs in their protracted 
sufferings and cheered them in their dying agonies, — the truth 
with which this prophecy seems instinct, " If we suffer, 
we shall also reign with Him," is utterly obliterated from 
its pages! The suffering "saints" get no reward; and the 
happy, blessed bride, rises not from a surging sea of sorrow 
and suffering, to the joy of her Lord's embrace and the glory 
of his throne. One of the great morals of the book is gone, 
as well as its dramatic tmity. The exigences of a false system 
alone could suggest such a wresting of Scripture as this. 

This system of interpretation, involves besides, a logical in- 
consistency. The bride is the Christian church ; her raiment 
identifies her with the previously mentioned " saints," and the 
<( saints " are — a Jewish remnant !* This is as if we should say : 



* The future existence of a Jewish remnant is not denied, though their 
history and experiences are mapped out by a certain school of prophetic 



PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 137 

the army is composed of soldiers, they wear uniforms; whenever 
you meet men in uniform they are — civilians I Surely they 
who teach thus should be ashamed for not rightly dividing the 
word of truth. " Be not carried about with divers and strange 
doctrines," is an exhortation we have need to remember. Let 
simple minded saints be reassured, and fear not to claim and 
appropriate, their divinely bestowed name ! 

The only way of avoiding the force of this argument is, to 
deny that the bride of the Lamb is the church ; for it is evident 
that the bride is identical with the saints, and it is evident also 
that the saints are on earth, during the whole course of the book. 
Those who are resolved to prove that the church is not repre- 
sented as on earth in these visions, must therefore not only 
deny that the saints are the church, but seeing the saints are 
identical with the bride, must also deny that the bride is the 
church. 

It is a painful and humiliating illustration, of the length to 
which the desire to uphold a favourite theory, will carry Christ- 
ian men, that many Futurists are to be found, who actually do 
deny this, and even glory in their shame in so doing, as if this 
departure from one of the first principles of Christ, were an 
attainment of advanced truth ! 

The bride of Christ a Jewish remnant ! ! It is then of the 
Jewish remnant that the apostle Paul speaks in Ephesians v. ; 
it is of the Jewish remnant that Eve, and Rebecca, and Rachel, 
and Asenath, and Zipporah, and Ruth, and Pharaoh's daughter 
are types ! It is of a Jewish remnant that Paul says, "I have 
espoused you as a chaste virgin to Christ ! " 

Even so. " The bride is not the figure of nearest associa- 



interpreters, far more definitely than by the word of God. That the rem- 
nant or remainder of the Jewish nation, will be restored to Palestine before 
the millennium, brought there into great trouble, and prepared by it 
to say, " Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord," that Christ 
will appear for their deliverance, and that they will be converted at the 
sight of Him, this much seems clear from Scripture. The gifts and calling 
of God are without repentance, and He has, not cast away his people whom 
He foreknew. 



138 PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATION. 



tion," say our accurate Futurist friends ; " the body is still 
nearer."' " The church is his body, the fulness of Him that 
filleth all in all." True ! but have ye not read, " he that loveth 
his wife loveth himself"} in a sense the bride is the body, and 
the body is the bride. The figures are twain, the truth is one. 
Such is the union, that Christ and his church are separate 
existences, as are bridegroom and bride ; such also is the union, 
that Christ and his church are one, as is the body with the 
head. " He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit " ; " because 
I live, ye shall live also." Let any one read Ephesians i. and 
v., and say is it not making a distinction without a difference, 
to assert that the bride and the body do not represent the 
same reality. 

Let it be granted then that, fulfilling all these types from 
Eden downwards, and realizing all the figures of most intimate 
association and union which language can convey, — the vine 
and the branches, the head and the members, the bridegroom 
and the bride, — the white robed saintly bride of Revelation 
xix. is the church of the redeemed ; and we claim that with- 
out all contradiction, the church is ox earth during the 

ACTION OF THE APOCALYPSE, AND THAT THEREFORE THE APOCA- 
LYPSE is a Christian prophecy, fulfilled in the events 
of the Christian Era. 



End of Part II. 



PART III. 

FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PROPHECIES OF " BABYLON," AND " THE BEAST." REA- 
SONS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THESE TWO PROPHECIES. 
FUNDAMENTAL, DIVINELY INTERPRETED j PRACTICALLY IM- 
PORTANT. BABYLON THE GREAT REPRESENTS THE APOS- 
TATE CHURCH OF ROME. 

THE scope of this work, prevents our attempting to enter 
into a detailed examination, of the symbols of the Apo- 
calypse. The book itself, as we have seen, interprets some of 
them, and other parts of Scripture interpret others. It would 
not be difficult to form a tolerably complete dictionary, of the 
meaning of the Apocalyptic symbols, by placing over-against 
each, passages of Scripture in which the same symbol is em- 
ployed in contexts which indicate its meaning ; or in historical 
narratives, ceremonial observances, or legal enactments, which 
throw light upon it. To search the Scriptures, is to find the 
solution of many a difficulty in this book, for it is more closely 
related to the rest of the Bible, than would by superficial 
readers be supposed^ 

We proceed, however, briefly to examine, two of the leading 
prophecies of the Revelation, a clear understanding of which, 
is ot itself, sufficient to determine its whole scope and charac- 
ter. They are two of the most important symbolisations in 
the entire series, they occupy several whole chapters, and are 
alluded to in others ; they are closely related to each other, 
and one of them is divinely interpreted. This is the vision of 



i4o FORETOLD AND FULFILLED 

Babylon the Great, in the seventeenth chapter of the book, 
a prophecy which by its synchronical connection with almost 
all the other predictions of the Apocalypse, furnishes a most 
valuable clue to the meaning and application of the whole 
series of visions. This prophecy has besides a solemn practical 
importance, rendering it peculiarly needful that it should be 
rightly interpreted. 

Immediately prior to the fall of Babylon, described in the 
1 8th chapter of Revelation, a voice from heaven cries, " Come 
out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, 
that ye receive not of her plagues ; for her sins have reached 
unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities." Is it 
not all-important that Christian people, should be very clear, 
as to the system thus solemnly denounced by a voice from 
heaven ? And similarly, immediately after the fall of Babylon, 
" a great voice as of much people in heaven," is heard saying, 
with reference to it, "Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and 
honour, and power, unto the Lord our God : for true and 
righteous are his judgments : for He hath judged the great 
whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and 
hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. And 
again they said, Alleluia. And her smoke rose up for ever 
and ever." If this symbol represents an evil so gigantic, that 
heaven itself is moved to psalms of praise, on the occasion 
of its overthrow, should not the church on earth be anxious to 
recognise it, and to avoid all connection with it ? 

The deep depravity attributed to " Babylon the Great," the 
peculiarly solemn adjuration to God's people to come out of 
her, and the utter and awful destruction denounced against 
her, all combine to attach great practical importance to the 
inquiry, what system is intended by this symbol ? 

A perusal of the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book of 
Revelation, shows that " Babylon the Great " represents a 
system which should last long, exert a subtle and extensive 
influence, and be guilty of exceeding iniquity and cruelty. 
This system must still be in existence^ seeing its destruction 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 141 

takes place, simultaneously with " the marriage of the Lamb," 
an event which we know to be, still future ; and seeing also 
that up to the moment of its destruction, or very nearly so, 
children of God will be found, more or less closely connected 
with it, so that a need will exist, for the urgent call, " Come 
out of her, my people." 

This system is prefigured as a cruelly persecuting one, as one 
that would " shed the blood of saints, and martyrs of Jesus," 
one on whom the Lord God would "avenge the blood of 
his servants." The Lord Jesus Christ, who loves his church, 
foreseeing the existence and career of this terrible system, 
forewarned, and thus fore-armed her by this prophecy. He 
furnishes her with abundant marks whereby the foe may be 
recognised, and solemnly warns her against making any truce 
or compromise, while He stimulates and encourages her for 
the long and bitter conflict, by a view of the final result. 
He would have his people in no perplexity or doubt on so 
momentous a question, so He has made this prediction 
peculiarly clear ; has placed it in marked and intentional con- 
trast with another prophecy, which makes its meaning still 
clearer ; and He has added besides, an explanation which 
leaves no room for the candid student to err. 

Let the reader note the contrasted features of the two sym- 
bolic prefigurations. 

"The whore that sitteth "The bride, the Lamb's 
upon many waters." wife." 

"Babylon the Great." "The Holy Jerusalem." 

"There came one of the " There came unto me one 

seven angels which had the of the seven angels which had 

seven vials, and talked with the seven vials full of the 

me, saying, Come hither ; I seven last plagues, and talked 

will show unto thee the judg- with me, saying, Come hither, 

ment of the great whore I will show thee the bride, 

that sitteth upon many the Lamb's wife, 
waters. 



14-2 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



" So he carried me away 
in the spirit into the wilder- 
ness : and I saw a woman sit 
upon a scarlet coloured beast, 
full of names of blasphemy, 
having seven heads and ten 
horns. 



" And he carried me away in 
the spirit to a great and high 
mountain, and showed me," 
(the bride, the Lamb's wife, 
under another symbol). (Rev. 
xxi.) 



"And the woman was ar- 
rayed in purple and scarlet 
colour, and decked with gold 
and precious stones and 
pearls, having a golden cup 
in her hand full of abomi- 
nations and filthiness of her 
fornication. And upon her 
forehead was a name writ- 
ten, Mystery, Babylon the 
Geeat, the mother of harlots 
and abominations of the earth. 



"To her was granted that 
she should be arrayed in fine 
linen, clean and white : for the 
fine linen is the righteousness 
of saints " (Rev. xix. 8). 

This Bride is described as 
"The Holy Jerusalem, de- 
scending out of heaven from 
God, having the glory of God : 
and her light like unto a stone 
most precious " (Rev. xxi.). 



"And I saw the woman 
drunken with the blood of the 
saints, and with the blood of 
the martyrs of Jesus" (Rev. 
xvii. 1-6). 



The dragon "persecuted the 
woman," and "the dragon 
was wrath with the woman, 
and went to make war with 
the remnant of her seed, 
which keep the command- 
ments of God and have the 
testimony of Jesus Christ" 
(Rev. xii. 13-17). 



As to Babylon, John adds, " when I saw her, I wondered 
with great admiration. And the angel said unto me, Where- 
fore didst thou marvel ? I will tell thee the mystery of the 
woman. . . . The seven heads are seven mountains, on 
which the woman sitteth. The waters, are peoples, and multi- 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 143 

tudes, and nations, and tongues. . . . And the woman 
which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the 
kings of the earth " (Rev. xvii. 7). 

These prophecies present, two broadly contrasted women, 
identified with two broadly contrasted cities, one reality being 
in each case, doubly represented, as a woman, and as a city ; 
the harlot and Babylon are one ; the bride and the heavenly 
Jerusalem are one. 

It is evident that the true interpretation of either of these 
double prefigurations, must afford a clue to the true interpreta- 
tion of the other. 

The two women are contrasted in every particular that 
is mentioned about them; the one is pure as purity itself, 
"made ready" and fit for heaven's unsullied holiness: the 
other, foul as corruption could make her, fit only for the fires 
of destruction. 

The one belongs to the Lamb, who loves her as the bride- 
groom loves the bride ; the other is associated with a wild 
beast, and with the kings of the earth, who ultimately hate 
and destroy her. 

The one is clothed with fine linen, and in another place is 
said to be clothed with the sun, and crowned with a coronet 
of stars ; that is, robed in Divine righteousness, and resplendent 
with heavenly glory ; the other, is attired in scarlet and gold, 
in jewels and pearls, gorgeous indeed but with earthly splen- 
dour only." 

The one is represented as a chaste virgin, espoused to 
Christ, the other is mother of harlots and abominations of 
the earth. 

The one is persecuted, pressed hard by the dragon, driven 
into the wilderness, and well-nigh overwhelmed ; the other is 
drunken with martyr blood, and seated on a beast which has 
received its power from the persecuting dragon. 

The one sojourns in solitude in the wilderness, the other 
reigns "in the wilderness" over peoples and nations and 
kindreds and tongues. 



144 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

The one goes in with the Lamb to the marriage supper, 
amid the glad hallelujahs of heaven ; the other is stripped, 
insulted, torn, and destroyed, by her guilty paramours. 

We lose sight of the bride, amid the effulgence of heavenly 
glory and joy, and of the harlot amid the gloom and darkness, 
of the smoke that " rose up for ever and ever." 

It is impossible to find in Scripture, a contrast more marked ; 
and the conclusion is irresistible, that whatever the one may 
represent, the other must prefigure its opposite. They are not 
two disconnected visions, but a pair — a pair associated, not by 
likeness, but by contrast. 

Now Scripture leaves us in no doubt, as to the signification 
of the emblematic bride, the Lamb's wife, the heavenly Jeru- 
salem. We read, " Husband, love your wives, even as Christ 
also loved the church, and gave Himself for it ; that He might 
sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, 
that He might present it to Himself a glorious church, not 
having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing ; but that it should 
be holy and without blemish." " For we are members of his 
body, of his flesh, and of his bones." The purpose of Christ's 
love, as regards his blood-bought church, is, that she should 
be with Him, and be one with Him for ever \ that she should 
behold and share his glory, being perfectly conformed to his 
image. Here in prophetic vision, we see this blessed design 
accomplished, and the complete and perfectly sanctified 
church, clad in spotless robes of righteousness, brought to the 
marriage supper of the Lamb. We see her persecuted like 
her Lord, and like her Lord and with her Lord, glorified. 
Beyond all question, the New Jerusalem bride represents the 
true church of Christ. 

What then must the contrasted symbol, the Babylonian 
harlot represent ? Surely some false and apostate church, some 
church which, while professing to belong to Christ, is in reality 
given up to fellowship with the world, and linked in closes! 
union, with the kings of the earth ; a worldly church, which 
has left her first love, forgotten her heavenly calling, sunk into 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 145 

carnality and sin, and proved shamelessly and glaringly faith- 
less to her Lord. 

Be it observed, that these symbols, a woman and a city, 
prefigure definite systems, corporate bodies, not merely a 
multitude of similar, but disconnected individuals. The tares 
of a wheat-field, the bad fish in the net, may represent such ; 
but here we have neither true Christians nor worldly pro- 
fessors, as individuals, but two corporations, two definite 
bodies. The true church of Christ is a body ; its members 
are united in the closest union to their Head and to each 
other ; one life animates them : " because I live, ye shall live 
also ; " one spirit dwells in them, they are one habitation of 
God. The link that unites them is however a spiritual one ; 
the body, is consequently invisible as such. A false church can 
have no such spiritual link. The bond that unites it must 
therefore be carnal, outward, visible ; the church represented 
by Babylon, must be a visible church, an earthly corporation, 
and as such capable of being discerned and recognised. Nor 
can the symbol comprise all false and faithless churches : to 
the harlot is expressly assigned a local connection — the woman 
and the city are one — if we can discover the name of the city, 
we shall be able to identify the church intended. 

The last words of the angel to John, seem to leave no 
possibility of mistake as to the city. " The seven heads are 
seven mountains on which the woman sitteth . . . and 
the woman which thou sawest is that great city which reigneth 
aver the kings of the earth." What city was that ? There was 
but one great city, which in John's day reigned over the kings 
of the earth. It was Rome; and Rome is the only city which 
was great then, has been great, in one way or other, ever since, 
and is so still. And Rome was seated on seven hills, " the 
seven mountains on which the woman sitteth." Her common 
name with the classic writers of St. John's age, is " the seven 
hilled city •" an annual festival used to be held in honour of 
the "seven hilled city;" every Latin poet of note during a 
period of five hundred years, alludes to Rome's seven hills ; 

L 



146 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



their names were the Palatine, the Quirinal, the Aventine, the 
Caelian, the Viminal, the Esquiline, and the Janiculum hills. 
The medais and coins of the day, represent Rome as a woman 
sitting on seven hills ; and her titles show with sufficient clear- 
ness, how thoroughly she reigned. She was styled " the royal 
Rome f " the mistress of the world f " the queen of nations." 
Her sway was all but universal. She was the metropolis ot 
that fourth great empire which Daniel had foretold would 
break in pieces and subdue all things, " dreadful and terrible 
and strong exceedingly f and at the time of the Apocalyptic 
visions, her power was at its height. Rome, and no other city 
can be intended here j the woman is in some way identified 
with Rome. We previously saw that she must represent a 
church, now we know what church. The harlot is the Church 
of Rome ; for simple minds there seems no escape from this 
conclusion. And it is a singular and notable fact, that no 
other city but Rome, has ever given its name to a church, 
which has embraced many kindreds and nations. Many 
countries have done so, and even individuals ; but as far as we 
are aware, no other city. We have the Greek Church, the 
Armenian and the Coptic Churches, the Lutheran Church, the 
Protestant Churches of various countries, the English Church, 
the Scotch Church, etc. ; but the papal system is styled, not so 
much the Latin Church, as the Church of Rome. "The 
woman which thou sawest is that great city " (not empire or 
country) " which reigneth over the kings of the earth." 

The question, however, naturally suggests itself, If the 
woman be identified in some way with Rome, why is her brow 
emblazoned with the name of Babylon ? The answer is 
evident ; the Apocalypse is a book of mysteries ; things are 
represented by signs ; realities are veiled ; and it would have 
been altogether inconsistent with the whole style of this 
prophecy to have written Rome on the harlot's brow. The 
woman is a figure of a church, a corrupt idolatrous church ; 
that is, the symbol seen by John was suggestive of something- 
wide]" different from itself; so the name with which that 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 147 

symbol was stamped, was also suggestive of something widely 
different from itself, though mysteriously similar. The harlot 
is " Mystery, Babylon the Great." That the literal Babylon 
was not intended, is perfectly clear, since that city was neither 
built on seven hills, nor reigning over the kings of the earth, 
in John's day. But that the literal Babylon was a most 
appropriate symbol for Rome, is equally evident. Analogies of 
the most remarkable kind, geographical, historical, and moral, 
existed, which fully account for the selection. Both were 
situated in the midst of vast plains, both largely built of brick 
made out of their own soil, the one had been Queen of the 
East, the other was then Queen of the West, Babylon of old 
had called herself " the golden city," " the beauty of the 
Chaldees' excellency," and claimed eternity as well as uni- 
versal supremacy. (Isa. xiv. 4-7.) Rome similarly styled 
herself " the eternal city," "the mistress of the world." But 
especially, both had been employed by God, as scourges for 
the guilty city of Jerusalem and people of Israel ■ and to each 
in its turn, had the sacred vessels of the Temple been carried 
as spoil ; Belshazzar abused them at his banquet, and Titus 
engraved them on his arch. 

Even had the plan of the Apocalypse not demanded it, cir- 
cumstances would have rendered it needful, for St. John to use 
a mysterious designation, in speaking as he here does of 
Rome. It would not have been safe in the days of Nero and 
Domitian, to expose the corruption, and predict the downfall 
and utter overthrow, of their capital. Persecution was already 
bitter [enough, as St. John was experiencing in Patmos ; and 
reserve on such a subject was evidently needful. But in spite 
of reserve and mystery, the true meaning of this symbolic name 
"Babylon," was early perceived by the Christians, and divined 
even by their enemies. Irenseus, who was a disciple of Poly- 
carp, who was a disciple of John himself, says, that " Babylon " 
in the Apocalypse signifies Rome ; and Tertullian says, " name! 
are employed by us as signs, Samaria is a sign of idolatry 
. . . Babylon is a figure of the Roman city, mighty, proud 



148 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

of its sway, and fiercely persecuting the saints/' So Jerome 
and others, in unbroken sequence, to the present day. When 
accused by their heathen Roman adversaries of holding sacred, 
predictions of the downfall of Rome, the early Christians never 
de?iied the charge, but merely replied, that they were far from 
desiring that downfall, since, little as Rome favoured Chris- 
tianity, the Antichrist whom they expected immediately to 
succeed, would do so still less. 

Babylon, then, in this prophecy means Rome ; even Roman 
Catholic writers are constrained to admit this. Bellarmine 
and Bossuet do not attempt to deny that these predictions 
concern Rome. They admit it freely, but assert that they 
refer to Rome as a heathen city merely, and not as a Christian 
church; and they maintain that the prophecy of the fall of 
Babylon, was fulfilled in the destruction of Rome, by the Goths, 
in the fifth century. " Babylon," say they, is Rome Pagan, not 
Rome Papal ; and they defend this position with considerable 
skill, and some show of reason. This interpretation originated 
with Bossuet in the 16th century; till that time it had never 
been supposed by any expositor, that the fall of Rome under 
Alaric, exhausted the prediction about the fall of Babylon. But 
as soon as the Protestant application of this prophecy to the 
Church of Rome, was felt to be a tremendous weapon against 
that church, its advocates were driven in self-defence, to find 
some interpretation which should turn its edge. 

It must not be supposed, however, that the interpretation 
now called Protestant, originated out of the party feeling and 
antagonism produced by the Reformation. On the contrary, 
the view that Babylon meant the Church of Rome, was held 
long prior to the Reformation, and may be said, to some 
extent,' to have produced it. As soon as the Church of Rome 
began to put forth her unscriptural claims, and to teach 
authoritatively her unscriptural doctrines, so soon did the 
faithful begin to recognise her, as the predicted Babylon of the 
Apocalypse. The earliest fathers of the church, who lived 
while Rome was Pagan, could not, of course, hold such a view. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 149 

Little did they dream that Rome, the persecuting pagan city, 
would ever become the seat and centre of a Christian church. 
Nor could this application of the prophecy arise, while Rome 
remained a faithful and pure Christian church; but at the 
close of the 6th century, Pope Gregory the First made a strong 
protest against the assumption of the title of " universal 
bishop" He went so far as to assert that " the first bishop who 
should assume it, would thereby deserve the name of Anti- 
christ." From that time to the present day, the testimony that 
the Church of Rome is Babylon, has never been dropped) and 
though, through all the middle ages, this view was held at 
great risk and peril, we can trace an unbroken succession of 
witnesses, each one bolder and more decided than the last, up 
to the time when Luther and the Reformers sounded aloud over 
Europe the trumpet-call, " Come out of her, my people, that ye 
be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her 
plagues." 

The argument, therefore, that the Protestant interpretation 
is a modern innovation, unknown to the first fathers of the 
Christian church, is valueless. We must now briefly examine 
the considerations which prove it to be the true view. 

And first, seeing the rise, pretensions, persecutions, domina 
tion, and decay, of the Papal Church, have been beyond all 
controversy the greatest and most important facts in church 
history, is it not incredible, that the prophecy intended to 
guide and sustain the church all through its course, should not 
allude to these facts, or even glance at the existence of this 
church ? And yet, if Babylon be not the Papal Church, we 
must agree with Bossuet, that that church is not so much as 
mentioned in the whole Apocalypse. 

And wherefore should so elaborate a prophecy, have been 
given about the character and doom of Rome Pagan, which 
was sacked by Alaric a.d. 410? Was it for a brief period 
of about 300 years only, that the Apocalypse was to afford 
guidance, support, and instruction to the church? Even 
admitting this improbability, what were the few, who in this 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



case were alone to benefit by the prophecy to learn from it? 
To shun heathen idolatry ? Not to bow down to the many 
gods of the Pantheon ? Not to burn incense to Jupiter ? But 
it did not need the Apocalypse to teach them that. Surely 
the martyrs who died in multitudes before this last prophecy 
was given to the church, had learned that lesson without its 
aid ! The early Christians were in no danger of relapsing into 
heathen idolatry ; but a Christian idolatry was to arise ; Anti- 
christ was to sit on the throne of Christ, in God's temple ; a 
fearful apostasy was to take place in the church itself ; it was 
an object well worthy of Divine inspiration, to indicate this 
new and specious form of 'evil ', which, rising slowly and imper- 
ceptibly, was destined to attain such gigantic proportions, and 
to endure for more than a thousand years. 

But there are statements in the prophecy itself, which entirely 
preclude its application to Pagan Rome, and its Gothic destruc- 
tion. This harlot city, Babylon, rules and rides upon the Roman 
beast in its ten homed state. Now the ten crowned horns, or 
ten kingdoms, of the Roman empire, did not make their appear- 
ance until after the barbarian eruptions, and the sack of Rome 
by Alaric. Rome Papal, on the other hand, rose into power 
simultaneously with these ten kingdoms, who " gave their power 
and strength" to her. Rome Papal ruled rulers, who voluntarily 
submitted to her authority, as is here predicted. Rome Pagan 
never did any such thing, she put down all kings, and ruled over 
them against their will. When did ten kingdoms agree to give 
their power to Imperial Rome ? Never ! To Papal Rome ? 
Throughout the dark ages / By her alluring devices, she obtained 
their willing subjection, and she still claims it as her due. 
To every Pontiff who assumes the tiara she says, " Know thyself 
to be the father of kings and princes, the ruler of the world." 

The prophecy further represents, that the harlot shall ulti- 
mately be destroyed by the ten kingdoms which had previously 
supported her. The destruction of Rome Pagan was not b) 
old friends, but by new enemies, who had never been in sub- 
jection to it, and cannot therefore be regarded as a fulfilment 
of this prophecy. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 151 

A further proof is found, in the condition to which Babylon 
is, as represented here, reduced by her overthrow. She be- 
comes " the habitation of devils, the hold of every foul spirit, 
and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird/' Now if the 
fall of Babylon be the sack of Rome by Alaric, this subsequent 
condition must denote the state of Rome Christian, a portrait 
Roman Catholics will hardly care to appropriate. It is added, 
that Babylon is to be burnt with fire and become utterly deso- 
late, and that she is to be plunged like a great millstone into 
the sea. But neither of these prophecies were fulfilled, in the 
Gothic destruction of Rome, and they must therefore be still 
unfulfilled; in other words, their fulfilment must occur, in 
connection with Rome Papal, and not with Rome Pagan. 

St. John saw this Babylonian harlot in a state of intoxication, 
" drunken with the blood of saints, and of the martyrs of Jesus f 
at which he says he " wondered with great admiration." This is 
a proof that he did not conceive the symbol to prefigure heathen 
Rome. It could have caused him no astonishment that the 
heathen city should persecute Christianity. He was painfully 
familiar with that characteristic of the Roman Empire, having 
seen thousands of his fellow-Christians martyred, and been all 
but a martyr himself. But that Rome should not only become 
a Christian church, but, being such, should be also a bitterer 
persecutor of Christians, than ever heathen Rome had been, 
this was indeed astonishing, and John might well wonder ! 

That the Church of Rome deserves pre-eminently to be 
stigmatized as " drunk with the blood of saints," cannot be 
disputed. What other church ever established an Inquisition, 
instigated a St. Bartholomew, and gloried in her shame in 
having done so ? What other Christian church has slain fifty 
millions of Christians for no crime but Christianity, as she has 
done? 

The Babylonian harlot is represented as enthroned upon 
many waters, which are nations and peoples. She is not only 
a church, but a church riding nations ; that is, she claims a 
temporal as well as a spiritual sway. She governs the beast 



152 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

and his ten horns ; and so unites a civil and a religious supre- 
macy. Now this is one of the most striking characteristics of 
the Church of Rome, and of that church only. Other churches 
may be so united to the State, that the State assumes the un- 
lawful right to govern them ; but no other church assumes the 
right to govern the State, yea, and all States, and to make all 
men her subjects. Rome did this, and does so still, even in 
her decrepitude and decay. She claims two swords, she holds 
two keys, she crowns her Pontiff with two crowns, the one a 
mitre of universal bishopric; the other, a tiara of universal 
dominion. " There is indeed a mystery on the forehead of the 
Church of Rome, in the union of these two supremacies ; and it 
has often proved a mystery of iniquity. It has made the holiest 
mysteries subservient to the worst passions ; it has excited re- 
bellion on the plea of religion ; it has interdicted the last spiritual 
consolations to the dying, and Christian interment to the dead, 
for the sake of revenge, or from the lust of power. It has for- 
bidden to marry, and yet has licensed the unholiest marriages. 
It has professed friendship for kings, and has invoked blessings 
on regicides and usurpers. It has transformed the anniversary 
of the institution of the Lord's Supper, into a season of male- 
diction, . . . and fulminated curses according to its will. 
Pius IX., in the year 1848, addressed the people of Rome thus, 
" It is one of the many great blessings which God has lavished 
on Italy, that our three millions of subjects should have two 
hundred millions of brother subjects of every language and nation" 
So that to the present day, Rome, by her extravagant and 
guilty claims, does all in her power to identify herself with the 
harlot of the Apocalypse, who sits upon many waters, which 
are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues." 

The title emblazoned on the brow of this mystic woman, is 
not only " Babylon the great " ; but " mother of harlots and 
abominations of the earth." This word "abominations" 
designates, as is well known, idols. * The literal ancient 

* See Hyslop's "Two Babylons." 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 153 



Babylon, was the mother of almost all the literal idolatries, 
that the earth has ever known. The spiritual Babylon is here 
charged with being a source and fountain of spiritual idolatry ; 
in other words, it is here predicted, that the Church of Rome 
would be an idolatrous church. 

It needs but to recall a few of the world-wide and long- 
enduring customs of that church, to prove how strikingly this 
prediction has been fulfilled. Rome enjoins the worship of a 
bread-god — the wafer, or sacrament 3 and anathematizes all who 
refuse to render it. The Council of Trent plainly declares the 
doctrine of transubstantiation, that the bread and wine in the 
sacrament are " changed into our Lord Jesus Christ, true God 
and true man," and adds, " there is therefore now no room to 
doubt, that all the faithful in Christ, are bound to venerate this 
holy sacrament, and to render thereto the worship of latria, 
which is due to the true God. ... If any one shall say, 
that this holy sacrament should not be adored, nor carried 
about in processions, nor held up publicly to the people, to 
adore it, or that its worshippers are idolaters, let him be 
accursed." This worship is rendered to " the Host " by 
Roman Catholics, not only when it is elevated at the time of 
the sacrament, but whenever it is carried in procession in the 
streets. All persons are by the sound of a bell, admonished to 
worship the passing God, and accursed if they refuse. On all 
the millions of her members in every land, Rome enjoins as a 
solemn and indispensable duty, the adoration of a bit of bread 
which a man may eat or a mouse may nibble. 

Millions of martyrs have perished for protesting against this 
idolatry, and asserting that it is blasphemy to say, man can first 
make God, and then eat him ; a creed more degrading than any 
that the heathen hold. In the days when the " Corpus Christi" 
procession was a most imposing and dazzling ceremony, when 
friars, and monks, and priests, and prebends, and canons, and 
bishops, and archbishops, in varied and splendid costumes 
attended the bread-god through the streets of crowded cities, 
amid the clang of bells, bands of military music, choral hymns, 



154 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

and clouds of incense, it was no easy matter for a heretic to 
escape detection. From the moment the Host came in sight, 
until it had passed right out of the range of vision, the multi- 
tudes were commanded to bow in profound adoration and awe ! 
And woe to the man who dared to do otherwise, the Inquisi- 
tion speedily became his home, and the auto dafe his portion. 

Nor is this the worst form of Rome's idolatry : her mari- 
olatry — her worship of the Virgin, is worse. We hesitate to 
record the profane blasphemies found in the writings of the 
Popes, prelates, and divines of Rome on this subject. Entire 
litanies of supplication are addressed to the Virgin ; attributes 
which are the glory of God alone, are ascribed to her ; the 
most extravagant and fantastic devotions are offered at her 
shrines ; the whole of the hundred and fifty Psalms of David, 
have been altered, so as to substitute for the Great Jehovah, 
the Virgin Mary, as an object of prayer and praise and holy 
trust : " Into thy hands I commend my spirit, O Lady, in thee 
have I reposed my hope ! Blessed is the man that loveth thy 
name, O holy Virgin, thy grace shall strengthen his soul. In 
thee, O Lady, have I hoped, I shall never be put to shame.'' 
This " Psalter of Bonaventura, Cardinal Bishop of Albano," 
has never been disowned, or prohibited by the Church of 
Rome. 

How completely the human mother has taken the place of 
her Divine Son, in the minds of Roman Catholics, may be 
gathered from a favourite story recorded by St. Francis. A 
monk had a vision ; he saw two ladders : one red, at the 
summit of which was Jesus Christ ; and the other white, at the 
top of which presided his blessed mother. He observed, that 
many who endeavoured to ascend the first ladder, after mount- 
ing a few steps, fell down ; and on trying again, were equally 
unsuccessful, so that they never attained the summit ; but a 
voice having told them to make trial of the white ladder, they 
soon gained the top, the blessed Virgin having held forth her 
hands to help them ! False doctrines, such as the fabulous 
" assumption of the Virgin" and the unscriptural "immacu- 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 155 

late conception," are freely invented by the Church of Rome, 
to justify this idolatrous adoration of the creature ; the latter, 
promulgated so lately as 1854, by the Pope in St. Peter's, in 
the presence of two hundred bishops, filled the Catholic 
Church with joy. The following passage is from an encyclical 
letter of Pius IX. :— 

" But that our most merciful Lord may the more readily lend 
an ear to our prayers, and grant our petitions, let us ever call 
upon the most holy mother of God, the immaculate Virgin 
Mary, to intercede with Him ; for she is the fond mother of us 
all, our mediatrix, our advocate, our securest and greatest 
hope, than whose interposition with God, nothing can be 
stronger, nothing more influential !" 

The * Te Deum " itself, has been parodied, in honour of 
Mary, " We praise thee, O Mother of God ! we acknowledge 
thee, O Virgin Mary ! All the earth doth worship thee, the 
spouse of the everlasting Father ! Holy, holy, holy, Mary, 
Mother and Virgin. The church throughout all the world 
joins in calling on thee, the Mother of the Divine Majesty!" 
And the creeds, have in like manner been parodied. 

Nor is it the Virgin alone who is worshipped. Images of 
her — mere dolls, are also adored ; witness the degrading cere- 
mony of the annual " coronation of the Virgin," in which the 
Pope himself takes part ; witness the worship of the " Ma* 
donna of the Augustinians " and other Madonnas. Mariolatry, 
among the ignorant masses, is pure image worship, idolatry in 
its most sensual and childish form, the adoration of a doll ! 

Space forbids more than a passing allusion to the other 
forms of idol worship, characterizing the Romish Church, the 
worship of the "wooden cross," the worship of the " bam- 
bino," the worship of the image of St. Peter, the worship of 
saints, the worship of relics, and similar profanities. When the 
subject is even superficially examined, the conviction that 
Rome Papal has exceeded Rome Pagan, in the degradation 
of her idolatries, becomes irresistible ; and the mind is over- 
whelmed with admiration of the wisdom and foreknowledge 



156 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



of the inspiring Spirit, who prefigured, ages before it existed, 
the Church of Rome, as the " mother of abominations ,; or 
" idols. " 

To conclude — in the true and eloquent words of another — 
"The Holy Spirit, foreseeing, no doubt, that the Church of 
Rome would adulterate the truth by many gross and grievous 
abominations ; that she would anathematize all who would not 
communicate with her, and denounce them as cut off from the 
body of Christ and the hope of everlasting salvation; foreseeing 
also that Rome would exercise a wide and dominant sway for 
many generations, by boldly iterated assertions of unity, anti- 
quity, sanctity, and universality ; foreseeing also that these pre- 
tensions would be supported by the civil sword of many secular 
governments, among which the Roman empire would be divided 
at its dissolution, and that Rome would thus be enabled to 
display herself to the world in an august attitude of imperial 
power, and with the dazzling splendour of temporal felicity : 
foreseeing also that the Church of Rome would captivate the 
imaginations of men, by the fascinations of art allied with 
religion, and would ravish their senses, and rivet their admir- 
ation, by gaudy colours, and stately pomp, and prodigal magnifi 
cence ; foreseeing also that she would beguile their credulity 
by miracles and mysteries, apparitions and dreams, trances and 
ecstasies, and would appeal to such evidence in support of her 
strange doctrines ; foreseeing likewise that she would enslave 
men, and (much more) women, by practising on their affec- 
tions, and by accommodating herself with dangerous pliancy to 
their weakness, relieving them from the burden of thought, and 
from the perplexity of doubt, by proffering them the aid of 
infallibility ; soothing the sorrows of the mourner by dispens- 
ing pardon, and promising peace to the departed ; removing 
the load of guilt from the oppressed conscience, by the minis- 
tries of the confessional, and by nicely poised compensations for 
sin ; and that she would flourish for many centuries in proud 
and prosperous impunity, before her sins would reach to heaven, 
and come in remembrance before God ; foreseeing also that 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 157 

many generations of men would thus be tempted to fall from 
the faith, and to become victims of deadly error ; and that 
they who clung to the truth would be exposed to cozening 
flatteries, and fierce assaults, and savage tortures, from her ; 
the Holy Spirit, we say, foreseeing all these things, in his 
Divine knowledge, and being the ever blessed Teacher, Guide, 
and Comforter of the church, was graciously pleased to pro- 
vide a heavenly antidote, for all these dangerous, wide-spread, 
and long-enduring evils, by dictating the Apocalypse. In this 
Divine book, the Spirit of God has portrayed the Church of 
Rome, such as none but He could have foreseen that she would 
become, and such as, wonderful and lamentable to say, she 
has become. He has thus broken her magic spells : He has 
taken the wand of enchantment from her hand ; He has lifted 
the mask from her face, and with his Divine hand, He has 
written her true character in large letters, and has planted her 
title on her forehead, to be seen and read of all, " Mystery, 
Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations 
of the earth." 

The Church of Rome holds in her hand the Apocalypse, the 
Revelation of Jesus Christ ; she acknowledges it to be Divine. 
Wonderful to say, she founds her claims on those very grounds 
which identify her with the faithless church, the Apocalyptic 
Babylon. As follows : — 

1. The Church of Rome boasts of universality : 

And the harlot is seated on many waters, which are nations 
and peoples and tongues. 

2. The Church of Rome arrogates indefectibility : 
And the harlot says that she is a queen for ever. 

3. The Church of Rome vaunts of temporal felicity, and 
claims supremacy over all : 

And the harlot has kings at her feet. 

4. The Church of Rome prides herself on working miracles ; 
And the minister of the harlot makes fire to descend from 

heaven. 

5. The Church of Rome points to the unity of all her mem- 



153 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

bers in one creed, and to their subjection under one supreme 
visible head : 

And the harlot requires all to receive her mark, and to drink 
of her cup. 

Hence it appears that Rome's notes of the church, are marks 
of the harlot ; Rome's trophies of triumph, are stigmas of her 
shame ; the very claims which she makes to be Zion, confirm 
the proof that she is Babylon. 

We have been contemplating the two mysteries of the 
Apocalypse. The word "mystery" signifies something spiritual; 
it here describes a church. The first mystery is explained to us 
by Christ Himself : "The mystery of the seven stars which thou 
sawest; the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches, 
and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest, are the seven 
churches." The second mystery is explained also : " I will 
tell thee the mystery of the woman. The woman is that great 
city which reigneth over the kings of the earth." 

The first mystery is the mystery of the seven stars. 

The second mystery is the mystery of the seven hills. 

The first mystery represents the universal church in its 
sevenfold fulness, containing within it all particular churches. 

The second mystery represents a particular church, the 
church on seven hills, the Church of Rome, claiming to be 
the church universal. 

The first mystery represents the universal church, liable to 
defects, but not imposing errors as terms of communion ; and, 
therefore, by virtue of the word and the sacraments, held to- 
gether in apostolic communion with St. John, and with Christ, 
who walketh in the midst of it, and governed by an apostolic 
ministry, shining like a glorious constellation, in the hand of 
Christ. 

The second mystery represents the particular Church of 
Rome, holding the cup of her false doctrines in her hand, and 
making all nations to drink thereof. 

The first is a mystery of godliness. 

The second is a mystery of iniquity." 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 159 

■ The foregoing is quoted from an admirable pamphlet, entitled, 
" Babylon ; or, the Question examined, Is the Church of Rome the 
Babylon of the Apocalypse?" by Chr. Wordsworth, D.D., Canon of 
Westminster (present Bishop of Lincoln). This book may fairly be called 
an unanswerable argument for an affirmative reply to the above inquiry. 
In 1850 the author challenged the Church of Rome to answer his argument 
in the following words : "If any minister or member of the Church of 
Rome, can disprove this conclusion, he is hereby invited to do so. If he 
can, doubtless he will; and if none attempt it, it may be presumed that 
they cannot ; and, if they cannot, then, as they love their salvation, they 
ought to embrace the truth which is preached to them, by the mouth of 
St. John, and by the voice of Christ," Sixteen years ago, when the above 
work was published, the author reiterated the challenge, and no reply has 
as yet been made to it by any member of the Church of Rome ! <; .Stac/i- 
less I" " Guilty before God . " 



CHAPTER II. 

The Man of Sin, or Antichrist. 

a great fourfold prophecy of fundamental importance 
(dan. vii. 7-27 ; rev. xiii. 1-9 ; rev. xvii. ; 2 thess. ii.). — 
the roman power. — its last form as predicted here. — 

INDIVIDUAL AND DYNASTIC USE OF THE WORD " KING." — 
AN APOSTATE, BLASPHEMOUS, AND PERSECUTING POWER, — 
EXACTLY ANSWERING TO THE ONE HERE PREDICTED, HAS 
BEEN IN EXISTENCE FOR MORE THAN TWELVE CENTURIES, 
IN THE SUCCESSION OF THE POPES OF ROME. — ORIGIN OF 
THIS POWER. — ITS MORAL CHARACTER. — ITS SELF-EXALTING 

UTTERANCES. ITS SELF-EXALTING ACTS. — ITS SUBTLETIES, 

FALSE DOCTRINES, AND LYING WONDERS. — ITS IDOLATRIES. 
— ITS DOMINION. — ITS PERSECUTION OF THE SAINTS. — ITS 
DURATION. — ITS DOOM. 

INTIMATELY associated with the Apocalyptic prophecy 
of Babylon the Great, which foretold, as we have seen, the 
existence, character, career, ana aoom, of the apostate church 
of Rome, is another prophecy so closely related to it, that the 
one cannot fairly be considered apart from the other. 

The woman which symbolises the corrupt church, is seen 
seated ona" scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, 
having seven heads and ten horns." As the angelic interpre- 
tation connects the woman with Rome, by the words : " the 
woman which thou sawest is that great city which ruleth over the 
kings of the earth," so it also connects this "beast" with Rome; 
for, interpreting its seven heads as seven successive forms ot 
government, the angel says of them, " five are fallen, and one 
is." Under one of its seven forms, then, the power here in- 
tended was the riding power in the days when the Apocalypse 
was granted. That power was, as we know, the Roman Em- 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 161 

pire ; it was by the tyrant Domitian that the Apostle John was 
exiled to Patmos, and it was under the Pagan persecutions of 
the Roman Emperors, that the saints of that age were suffering 
martyrdom. 

The past as well as the future history of this power, is sketched 
by the angel. Five of its forms of government had, at that 
time, already passed away. The sixth was then in existence, a 
seventh was to follow and last a short time, and then should 
come the eighth and last ; and it was on the beast as governed 
by this eighth and last head, that the woman was seen seated. 
Speaking of the " heads," or forms of government, the angel 
says, "Five are fallen, and one is, and the other is not yet 
come, and when he cometh he must continue a short space ; 
and the beast which thou sawest . he is the eighth, 

and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition." 

This scarlet-coloured beast is then a symbol of the final form 
of the Roman power, the last phase of that power whose entire 
course is represented by the fourth great beast of Daniel. (Dan. 
vii.) A careful perusal of these prophecies, leaves no room to 
doubt, that the same power is symbolised a third time in the 
" beast from the abyss," described in the thirteenth chapter of 
Revelation. These scriptures present a threefold prophetic 
history, of one and the same power; and that power, beyond all 
question, is the great, the terrible, the exceeding strong, Roman 
Empire, the fourth universal monarchy from that of Babylon, 
the one which, both in Daniel's vision of the four beasts, and in 
Nebuchadnezzar's vision of the image, is represented as con- 
tinuing, till the establishment of the everlasting kingdom of the 
God of heaven. 

In common with the three preceding empires this power is re- 
presented as a beast, that is as degraded, ignorant, and ferocious. 
Daniel, in the days of Belshazzar, long before the first Advent, 
saw it as a <?^-headed beast , John in the days of Domitian, 
when it had already been more than eight centuries in existence, 
saw it as a ,^'^-headed beast, fuller detail being naturally 
revealed to the later seer. 



162 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

As a matter of fact, the great Roman power, did actually 
exist under seven distinct and constantly recognised forms of 
government, enumerated by Livy, Tacitus, and historians in 
general, as such. Rome was ruled successively by kings, con- 
suls, dictators, decemvirs, military tribunes, military emperors, 
and despotic emperors ; the form of government being entirely 
dissimilar under these two last, though the name Emperor was 
common to both. 

This empire is represented as existing first in an undivided 
state, and secondly in a divided tenfold state. As a matter of 
history, it is notorious that the Roman power has done this. 
From its rise to the fourth century it was one and undivided ; 
since its decline and fall as an empire, it has been broken up 
^nto many independent sovereignties, held together by a com- 
mon submission to the Popes of Rome. The number of dis- 
tinct kingdoms into which the Roman Empire in Europe has 
been divided, has always been about ten, at times exactly ten, 
sinking at other times to eight or nine, and rising occasionally 
to twelve or thirteen, but averaging on the whole ten* This 
is generally admitted, and indeed cannot be denied ; the fact 
lies on the surface of the history of Europe since the break-up 
of the Roman Empire, and serves as an important clue to the 
true scope and fulfilment of these predictions. 

The point of supreme importance, in connection with this 
thrice-symbolised Roman Empire, is (to judge from the great 
prominence given to it by the inspiring Spirit), its connection in 
its seco?id stage with a peculiar and diabolical poiuer of evil, the 



* " It seems unnecessary," says Wordsworth, present Bishop of Lincoln, 
"to specify ten particular kingdoms into which the Roman Empire was 
divided ; or even to demonstrate that it was divided into precisely ten 
kingdoms. The most ancient passage of Scripture in which the prophecy 
of the future division of the Roman Empire is found, is the vision of the 
image {Dan. ii. 42), where these kingdoms are represented by the toes of 
the image. Being toes they must be ten. Hence, when this dismember- 
ment is described in other successive prophecies this denary number is re- 
tained : and thus the number ten connects all these prophecies together, 
and serves to show that they all point to the same object." (Wordswortij 
on the Apocalypse, p. 524.) 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 163 



rise, character, and actings of which, are delineated with greater 
fulness, than are those of the Empire itself. It is evident that 
the " little horn " of Dan. vii., and the " eighth head " of the 
beast in Rev. xiii. and xvii. represent some important and 
mysterious power of evil, distinct from, and yet connected with, 
the Roman Empire, in its second or divided stage. How im- 
portant this power is in the Divine estimation, maybe gathered 
from the fact, that more than ten times as much space is 
devoted to a description of it, than is occupied by the whole 
course and continuance, of either of the first three universal 
monarchies. These are each dismissed in a single verse ; the 
little horn occupies ten or eleven, as if ten times more import- 
ance were attached to this strange power destined to arise in 
■"he second stage of the Roman dominion, than to any one of 
the vast and mighty empires of antiquity. Moreover, it is 
evidently the character and actings of this horn, or head, or 
power, that determine the doom of the beast. 

Before we inquire what this power is, we must associate a 
fourth prophecy with these three, and consider very briefly St. 
Paul's prediction of the man of sin. 

" Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
and by our gathering together unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken in 
mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from 
us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any 
means : for that day shall not come, except there come A falling away 
first, and that man of sln be revealed, the son of perdition ; who 
opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is 
worshipped ; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing him- 
self that he is God. Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, 1 
told you these things ? And now YE KNOW what withholdeth that he might 
be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work : 
only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. And 
then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with 
the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brigh tness of his coming : 
even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and 
signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness 
in them that perish ; becaus e they received not the love of the truth, that 
they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong 
delusion, that they should believe a lie " (2 Thess. ii. 1-11). 



1 64 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

In this passage, Paul, — in his endeavour to remove from the 
minds of the Thessalonians, the erroneous expectation of the 
immediate advent of Christ, which they were entertaining, and 
which they had perhaps derived from the expression in his 
previous epistle, "we who are alive and remain," — reminds them 
of something he had before told them, that certain events had 
to intervene, that an apostasy had to take place in the church, 
whose incipient workings might already be detected. It was to 
issue in the development of a terrible power of evil, which he 
proceeds to describe, but which he tells them, could not be 
fully manifested, till a certain hindrance, (and what that is, he 
adds, "you know ") should be removed. 

The very earliest traditions tell us, that the hindrance here 
alluded to was the Roman Empire as then existing, and that 
Paul having previously by word of mouth made known that fact 
to the church, avoided, from prudential reasons, more explicit 
reference to it in this written communication. He did not 
wish to expose the persecuted Christians to fresh dangers, by 
putting into the hand of their enemies, proof of what would by 
them have been considered, a seditious creed. 

Tradition is often an unsafe guide ; but in this case it seems 
peculiarly entitled to respect. The point was both an im- 
portant, and a simple one; those who received the 'information 
from the apostle were not likely to forget it, and could scarcely 
err in repeating it ; and from no other source than tradition, 
could the church of later ages learn, a fact, communicated by 
word of mouth only, and purposely omitted from the inspired 
letter of the apostle. We may therefore be thankful, that the 
tradition as to what this hindrance was, is of a very early date, 
is explicit, and agrees with what we learn from other scriptures ; 
as well as that there is no counter-tradition on the point 
From Irenseus, the discip-le of Polycarp, the contemporary of 
St. John, we first hear, that the hindrance mentioned by Paul 
when he was with the Thessalonians, and alluded to in his 
second epistle, was the Roman Empire ; and from him down- 
wards the fathers are unanimous in this assertion. Paul says 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 165 

to the early church, "ye know;" the early church, (though not 
the identical generation,) tell us what they knew, and who are 
we, that we should say they are mistaken ? How can we be in 
a position to correct their error ? 

Besides, there is the strongest presumption that they were 
right, for how should Irenseus and the fathers invent such an 
improbable notion ? They were far more likely to imagine the 
Roman Emperor to be Antichrist, than to imagine him to be 
the great obstacle to Antichrist's development ! Its truth alone 
can account for the existence of this tradition, at the date at 
which we first meet it. 

The point is important, because his connection with the 
Roman Empire, is one of the links in the chain of evidence, 
which proves, that the " man of sin " and " son of perdition " 
here foretold, is identical with the power described in the three 
prophecies we have just considered. He was to reign at 
Rome, else why would the then regnant power be a hindrance 
to his development ? He was to succeed soon after the fall of 
the Roman Emperors, " then shall that wicked be revealed ;" 
he was ta emanate from Satan, " whose coming is after the 
working of Satan f he was to wield an ecclesiastical power, 
though succeeding purely secular rulers, " the temple of God," 
or Christian church, being the special scene of his ostentation 
and pride ; he was to be an opposer of Christ and his laws ; 
and he was to be consumed like the " little horn," by the bright- 
ness of Christ's coming. In all these respects, the power here 
foretold by Paul exactly resembles that predicted by Daniel 
and John, and as two such powers could not co-exist, it must 
be the same power. Its rise, actings, character, and doom, are 
here foretold in plain words, while in the other prophecies, they 
are veiled in symbolic language. 

In seeking the fulfilment of this fourfold prediction, we must 
therefore combine the features given in each separate prophecy, 
and, recognising the principle of progressive revelation, we 
must modify the views derived from the earlier, by the later 
prophecies, and those derived from the later by the latest. 



1 66 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

The particulars revealed about this great and peculiar power 
of evil, or " man of sin/' are neither few nor vague ; but, like 
those given by the spirit of prophecy respecting the Lord Jesus 
Christ before his advent, — they are numerous, full, and most 
definite. They comprise explicit information as to the time, 
place, and mode of his origin, and as to the attendant circum- 
stances ; they assign to him various and deeply significant 
names ; they describe his character and his actings toward God 
and toward man' ; his official position ; his pride ; his idola- 
tries ; his blasphemies ; his lying wonders and false miracles ; 
the extent of his dominion ; his coadjutors; his persecutions 
of the saints of God ; his opposition to the Lamb of God ; the 
duration of his prosperity and power ; the causes of his decay 
and fall ; his end, and his eternal portion. There is added, 
besides, a mysterious numerical mark, designed to secure his 
recognition by the wise. This is indeed the object for which 
this prophetic portrait is given to the church, that she might 
recognise her great enemy when he should appear, be sustained 
in her sufferings under him, and be encouraged to resist him 
even to blood. It is not a portrait easily to be mistaken : the 
features are too terrible and too peculiar, to belong to more 
than one incarnation of evil. 

Interpreting, then, by the help of Scripture itself, the symbols 
under which realities are veiled, and blending in our minds the 
scattered intimations of this fourfold prophecy of the man of 
sin, and son of perdition, we will endeavour to point out the 
power, that in every respect answers to the portrait, sketched 
by the pen of inspiration. That power we are fully persuaded, 
and hope to be able to prove to the satisfaction of every un- 
prejudiced reader, is, the succession of the Roman Pontiffs, the 
line of tiara-crowned monarchs, who for more than twelve 
centuries governed Papal Europe, who ranked as temporal 
sovereigns, and united under their sway the kingdoms of 
western Christendom. 

As the Futurist school of interpreters hold a contrary view 
to this, and maintain that the fourfold prophecy in question 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 167 

refers to a single individual, and not to a succession of rulers, 
we must examine the symbols employed, and the statements 
made in these predictions, to see which view has most Scripture 
authority. 

In Daniel's vision, the power in question is represented as 
a horn of the Roman beast — " a little horn." Now a horn in 
these symbolical prophecies signifies sometimes an individual 
king, and sometimes a dynasty or race of rulers. In the 
" notable horn " of the he-goat, or Grecian Empire, universally 
admitted to have prefigured Alexander the Great, we have an 
instance of the use of the symbol in the former sense ; and in 
the " four horns," which came up in the place of that notable 
horn, and represented the dynasties of the Ptolemies, the Seleu- 
cidse, etc., we have an instance of its use in the latter sense. 

It is an exceedingly important inquiry, in which sense is 
the symbol used in the prophecy we are considering. Are the 
ten horns and their cotemporary the "little horn" individual 
rulers, or are they races of rulers ? We turn to the angelic 
interpretation of the vision for additional light. " The ten 
horns are the ten kings which shall arise, and another shall rise 
after them." If the word " king " here, necessarily signifies an 
individual monarch, the question is answered ; the ten horns 
must be ten individual kings, and their cotemporary, the 
" little horn," must in that case be an individual also. If this 
be so, the Futurists are right ; for since we know the " man of 
sin " is to be in existence at the coming of Christ, it follows, 
that his career is future; since an individual can live only the 
ordinary life of mortals. If we say again, a " king " must 
signify one man, and not a race of men, then the whole Pro- 
testant system of interpretation is erroneous ; then the in- 
numerable multitude of martyrs, confessors, and commentators, 
who have deemed that they recognised Antichrist, and heard 
his voice, and felt his oppressions, were deluded, and betrayed 
into gross perversion of the word of God ; then the Waldenses, 
and the Wickliffites, and John Huss, and Jerome of Prague, 
and all their fellow-sufferers were deceived on this most 



i68 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

important subject ; and then, moreover, the event, which the 
church of the 19th century has to expect, is not the speedy 
coming of Christ, but, as the Futurists assert, the very same 
that the Thessalonians of the first century were directed to look 
for, a prior advent and revelation of Antichrist. 

It is therefore a momentous inquiry, which must not be 
lightly passed over, Does the word " king" in common and in 
Scripture usage, necessarily mean an individual ? On the answer 
to this question, depends in great measure our judgment, as to 
whether the long-predicted Antichrist is a past and present 
power, or whether we are still to look forward to his reign as 
a future event. 

It is a maxim of the English Constitution that "the king 
cannot die." Does that maxim assert the immortality of an 
individual ? or does is not rather assert the perpetuity of the 
Royal Office ? "The king of England is a constitutional 
monarch," is a statement, which as much includes Queen 
Victoria as George III., though she is not a king at all, because 
it asserts what is characteristic of the whole line of English 
monarchs. If we read " the king of Prussia was at war with 
the emperor of France," we do not imagine that the two men 
were fighting a duel, but perceive that the word is used in a 
representative sense, the "king" including his kingdom, and 
the emperor representing his empire. In ordinary language, 
then, the word " king " may have a personal, an official, or a 
representative force ; the context must in each case determine 
its signification. In treating of brief periods, and trivial 
events, the word is generally used in the personal sense; but 
in treating of long stretches of history, and great abstract 
principles, in the official or representative sense. 

As far as ordinary usage can be a guide, the extended sense 
of the word, is therefore most likely to be the true one in the 
passage under consideration, which treats of the succession of 
empires, and gives an outline of the world's history to the end 
of time. 

But we are not left to this presumption ; the prophecy itself 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 169 

uses the expression in the extended official sense, immediately 
before the sentence in question. (Dan. vii. 17.) "These great 
beasts which are four, are four kings which shall arise out of 
the earth." Did this mean four individuals ? Nay ! but four 
great universal einfiires, each of which endured for centuries, 
under a succession of monarchs. 

This proves that the ten horns and the little horn may be 
dynasties and not individuals ; it does not prove that they 
must. It shows that Scripture uses the word in both senses, 
and many confirmatory instances of this official use of it, 
might be quoted. (Compare Jer. xxv. 9-12 ; xxvii. 6, 7.) 

The great question is, How is it used in the symbolic pro- 
phecies of Daniel ? A little investigation will show that out of 
six instances in which it occurs, jive require the extended official 
sense, and i?i the other, the two meanings of the word coincide. 
The probability, therefore, is, that governments, and not in- 
dividual men, are intended by the ten horns and the little 
horn. 

A further argument for the same view is found in the fact 
that these prophecies are evidently continuous. There are no 
gaps, between the parts of the image seen by Nebuchadnezzar ; 
the ten toes, (which are evidently identical with these ten 
horns,) are joined on to the legs of iron. The interpretation 
links the history in the same way. Every subsequent stage 
follows immediately on the preceding one. There was no 
interval between the fall of Belshazzar and the rise of Darius 
the Mede. " In that night he took the kingdom." So in each 
case. How contrary then to all analogy to suppose an interval 
of over 1200 years, between the close of the undivided state 
of the Roman Empire, and the commencement of the divided 
state, which is presented as immediately succeeding ! And 
this, when it is an undeniable and notorious fact, that a tenfold 
division did take place immediately after the dissolution of 
the old Roman Empire, and has continued more or less defi- 
nitely from that day to this ! 

Prophecy foretells that the Roman Empire, when it ceased 



170 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

to exist as one kingdom, should begin to exist as ten ; history 
tells us that it did so ; and as we adoringly admire this corre- 
spondence, between the prediction and the fact, Futurist inter- 
preters try to persuade us, that the prophecy does not predict 
this fact at all, that the ten horns do not symbolise the ten king- 
doms into which the old Roman Empire was broken up ; but 
that, leaping over the twelve centuries marked by this fact, to a 
period still future, it predicts the rise, of ten individual men, 
whose brief career of a few years, is to be terminated by the 
Epiphany of Christ ! 

Is* not this to make the prophecy of God of none effect 
through their interpretation? 

And further, as we shall hereafter prove, the chronology 
of these visions, is as symbolic as their other features, and is 
expressed on the year-day scale. The duration assigned to 
this great power of evil, is therefore 1260 years (time, times, 
and half a time) ; and this alone decides the question. The 
ten horns, and their cotemporary the little horn, represent 
dy?iasties, like the four horns of the Grecian he-goat and the 
two horns of the Medo-Persian ram. 

The symbol employed in the Apocalyptic prophecy to pre- 
figure this evil power, equally demands its dynastic character, 
and forbids the thought that an individual man is intended. 
It is represented as an eighth head of the Roman beast, an 
eighth form of government, having its seat at Rome. Now 
none of the previous "heads" of the Roman world, were 
individual rulers; but each consisted of a series of rulers. Seven 
kings formed the first head, and lasted 220 years; consuls, 
tribunes, decemvirs, and dictators, were the next four heads, 
and governed Rome in turn for nearly 500 years ; sixty-five 
emperors followed, and ruled the Roman world for 500 years 
more. Now the man of sin, Antichrist, is to be the last, and 
the most important " head" of this same Roman beast. If he be 
a race of rulers enthroned at Rome, and governing thence 
the Roman world for more than twelve centuries, it is in har- 
mony with all the rest. But if the eighth head represent one 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED, 171 

individual man, who exeicises authority for only three years 
and a half, there is an utter violation of all symmetry and 
proportion in the symbol. Analogy demands that the last 
head, be like all the previous ones, a race or succession of riders. 

The Thessalonian prophecy leads us to the same conclusion. 
The mystery of iniquity was already working in the apostle's 
day ; that mystery which was to result in the development of 
the man of sin. Now, ifh.Q be not yet come, and {/"when he 
comes he is to reign only three and a half years, we have this 
extraordinary fact ; that it has taken Satan eighteen or nine- 
teen centuries to produce this singH, short-lived enemy of the 
church. Reductio ad absurdum ! 

If, on the other hand, Antichrist rose on the fall of the 
Roman Empire, all is reasonable and natural. Satan worked 
secretly for three or four centuries, corrupting the church by 
false doctrine, worldliness, etc., and at last, having gradually 
prepared the world and the church to receive him, he en- 
throned the Antichrist at Rome, in a race of rulers, who, com- 
bining temporal and spiritual power, and using both to hinder 
the spread of the truth, were to be for more than twelve 
centuries, his principal agents upon earth. 

It is not denied that the Thessalonian prophecy gives the 
impression, on a cursory perusal, that it predicts a single in- 
dividual. This is exactly in harmony with the style of 
prophetic chronology, with that mysterious year-day system 
which was selected by God to keep alive the hope and expecta- 
tion of the coming of Christ, throughout the whole course of the 
dispensation. Had the dynastic character and real period of 
the son of perdition been revealed clearly, the return of Christ 
would to the early Christians, have been postponed to a hope- 
lessly distant future. But, though the early church knew (after 
the publication of second Thessalonians) that the advent of 
Antichrist was to precede the advent of Christ, they supposed 
he would be an individual, whose period would be brief ; and 
the expectation formed no hindrance to their watching and 
waiting for the Lord's return. 



172 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



Many other arguments in favour of the dynastic character 
of the power answering to the "little horn" and "eighth head/' 
might be adduced ; but these must suffice. The fulfilment is 
the great proof . Such a power as is here predicted, has existed, 
has done the things this power was to do, has borne the cha- 
racter and undergone the experiences here described ; it rose 
at the crisis here indicated, lasted the period here assigned, 
answered in every point with the most marvellous exactitude 
to these prophetic prefigurations, and was recognised by those 
who suffered under it, as the power here intended. If a 
singularly complex lock is opened by a key equally complex 
in its structure, who doubts that the one was made to fit the 
other ? 

So copious is the evidence, of the fulfilment in the history 
of the Popedom of this remarkable fourfold prophecy, that it 
is almost impossible fairly to present it in a brief compass. 
Learned and able writers have filled volumes without number, 
with proofs, that the Papacy has accomplished every clause of 
these predictions. Every history of the middle ages, every de- 
scription of the monastic orders, and of the Jesuits, every nar- 
rative of the Papacy and its proceedings, every bull, and every 
decretal, issued by the sovereign Pontiffs, many a monument, 
and many a medal, and many a mournful martyrology, lend 
their witness to the fact. Space obliges us to confine ourselves 
here, to the merest outline of the overwhelming mass of historic 
testimony, that might be adduced on the subject. We append 
a list of works from which fuller information may be obtained.* 

I. Origin. 

The " little horn," in Daniel, is a horn of the Roman beast, 
that is a political power, which rules over part of the territory 
formerly governed by the Caesars. The eighth head in Revela- 
tion is similarly a head of the Roman beast, the same beast 
that was in power when the Apocalypse was written, and had 
been for centuries previously. Two intimations exist that 

• See Appendix A. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



Rome itself was to be the seat of this ruling power : it is an 
eighth head, and the seven previous ones had all ruled at Rome; 
and Paul says that the removal of the Imperial power from 
Rome, was a needful preliminary to its rise. 

As a horn, this power was to be little — " a little horn f its 
dominions were never to be territorially large, nor its mere 
political influence great ; and yet it was to be more influential 
and important than all the rest. It was to displace three 
horns, as it grew up among the ten, but these were apparently 
to be replaced, for the horns are always spoken of as " ten." 
Though only a horn, this power has some of the attributes of a 
head, for its " eyes and mouth " impart to it an incontestable 
superiority over the rest. In the later vision of John, the same 
power is represented as a head, an " eighth head," representing 
a former seventh head, which had recei ved a deadly wound. 
By both emblems it is presented, as in some important sense 
a prolongation of the power of the old Roman Empire. The 
immediately preceding head, or form of government, was to 
receive a deadly wound, so that the beast should seem to be 
for a time destroyed ; but under this eighth head it should 
revive, and become as strong as ever. The one original 
Empire was to be broken up ; in its stead a number of smaller 
kingdoms were to arise ; and cotemporaneously with their rise, 
was to spring up also this mysterious, peculiar, " little horn," 
this unique and singularly evil power, territorially small, but 
yet so all-influential, that it would take the lead of the rest, be- 
come their head, and so reunite, by a new bond, the recently dis- 
severed and indepe7ident portions of the Western Empire of Rome. 

Now to any one familiar with the history of Europe from the 
division of the Roman Empire, into Eastern and Western under 
Valens and Valentinian, to the time of the Reformation, this 
prophecy reads like history. So exact, so singularly descriptive 
is the figuration, that if it were proposed as a problem, to pre- 
sent the phenomena attending the rise of the Papacy, in a 
single symbol, it would be impossible to discover one more 
appropriate. 






174 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

What are the notorious facts of the case, facts attested by 
historians of unquestionable accuracy and impartiality, admitted 
by Roman Catholic writers, and confirmed by redundant evi- 
dence ? Briefly these, — 

After the reception of Christianity by Const an tine, and its 
establishment as the religion of the Empire, corruption and 
worldliness, which had long been rife in the Church, increased 
with fearful rapidity. At the close of the fourth century, the 
bishopric of Rome was already deeply sunk in these and other 
vices, and full of earthly ambition ; rival bishops contended 
for the episcopal authority with the carnal weapons and fierce 
passions of secular rulers, and indulged in luxury and pomp 
that imitated those of the Emperors themselves. 

When the Empire expired under Augustulus, (the hin- 
drance mentioned in Thessalonians, being at last removed,) 
the mystery of iniquity so long working, began to develop 
itself rapidly. The spiritual power and pretensions of the Pa- 
pacy were great, though some time still elapsed ere it became 
a temporal power. When the dismemberment of the Roman 
world by the barbarian invasions began, Italy fell first to the 
share of Odoacer and the Heruli. But theirs was never a firm 
or strong kingdom. The bishops of Rome hated the authority 
to which they were obliged to submit, and desired its over- 
throw. In about twenty years from its establishment, this was 
accomplished, and the first " horn " that had sprung up in 
Italy and hindered (like the defunct Empire) the development 
of the little horn, was rooted up before it. 

A new power, however, succeeded, and for two generations 
held dominion over Rome and her bishops. Theodoric, the 
Ostrogoth, became master of Italy, and the Popes for sixty 
years had to own him and his successors as superiors and rulers. 
But their own pretensions and claims were rapidly increasing, 
and keeping pace with the growing corruption of the Church. 
The Gothic yoke became unbearable to them, and, mainly 
through the influence of the Popes, Belisarius, the great general 
of the Eastern Emperor Justinian, expelled the Ostrogoths from 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 175 

Italy. A secondhom had now fallen before the rising power; the 
Exarchate of Ravenna was established, and very shortly a third 
barbarian power obtained the greater part of Italy. Alboin 
and his Lombard followers held sway over its fairest territories, 
though they avoided making Rome their capital. Degraded 
to the rank of a second city, Rome was left to the care of her 
bishops, whose authority began to assume a mixed temporal 
and spiritual character. They had as yet no temporal domin- 
ions, but they were striving to take their place among earthly 
sovereigns, and even already asserting a superiority to them in 
certain respects. The ancient metropolis of the world had at 
this time sunk very low in political influence and power. 

" The lofty tree under whose shade the nations of the earth 
had reposed, was deprived of its leaves and branches, and the 
sapless trunk was left to wither on the ground. The ministers 
of command, and the messengers of victory, no longer met on 
the Appian Way, and the hostile approach of the Lombards was 
often felt, and continually feared. . . . The Campagna of 
Rome was speedily reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness, 
in which the land is barren, the waters impure, and the air 
infectious. . . . Like Thebes, or Babylon, or Carthage, 
the name of Rome might have been erased from the earth, if 
the city had not been animated by a vital principle, which again 
restored her to honour and dominion. A vague tradition was 
embraced, that two Jewish teachers, a tent-maker and a fisher- 
man, had formerly been executed in the circus of Nero; and 
at the end of 500 years their genuine or fictitious relics, were 
adored as the Palladium of Christian Rome. . . . The 
temporal power of the Popes insensibly arose from the calam- 
ities of the times, and the Roman bishops who have (since) 
deluged Europe and Asia with blood, were compelled to reign 
as the ministers of charity and peace. . . . The misfor- 
tunes of Rome involved the apostolical pastor in the business 
of peace and war."* 

The Lombard sway, in its turn, became intolerable to the 
* Gibbon, " Decline and Fall," chap, xlv., p. 791. 



176 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

ambitious Popes of Rome ; and at last, through their earnest 
entreaties, and awful threats, Pepin and Charlemagne came to 
their rescue, uprooted the Lombards from Italy, overthrew then- 
power, and presented their dominions as a free gift to tJie Pope. 

The third horn had fallen before the rising power of the 
Papacy, and it stood forth at last firmly settled in its place 
on the head of the Roman beast. " The ancient patrimony 
of the Roman Church, consisting of houses and farms, was 
transformed by the bounty of these kings, into the temporal 
dominions of cities, and provinces ; and the donation of the 
Exarchate to the Pope was the first-fruits of the victories of 
Pepin. . . . The splendid donation was granted in supreme 
and absolute dominion, and the world beheld for the first time, 
a Christian Bishop, invested with the prerogatives of a temporal 
prince: the choice of magistrates, the exercise of justice, the 
imposition of taxes, the wealth of the Palace of Ravenna."* 

Thus as to the time, place, and manner of its origin, the 
power of the Popes of Rome fulfilled the symbolic predictions : 
" I considered the horns ; and behold there came up among 
them another little horn, before whom there were three of 
the first horns plucked up by the roots." "The ten horns 
out of this (fourth) kingdom, are ten kings that shall arise; 
and another shall rise after them, and he shall be diverse 
from the first, and he shall subdue three kings." 

The following extract, is from a recent work by a Roman 
Catholic writer who has given a description of the rise of the 
Papacy, which could hardly have been differently worded, had 
he intended to point out its fulfilment of the prophecy of the 
"little horn." 

" The rise of the temporal power of the Popes, presents to 
the mind one of the most extrordinary phenomena, which the 
annals of the human race, offer to our wonder and admiration. 
By a singular combination of concurring circumstances, a new 
power and a new dominion^ grew up, silently but steadily, on the 
ruins of that Roman empire, which had extended its sway over, 
* Gibbon, " Decline and Fall," chap, xlix., p. SS5. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 177 

or made itself respected by, nearly all the nations, peoples, and 
races, that lived in the period of its strength and glory ; and 
that new power, of lowly origin, struck a deeper root, and soon 
exercised a wider authority, than the empire whose gigantic 
ruins, it saw shivered into fragments, and mouldering in dust. 
In Rome itself, the power of the successor of Peter, grew side 
by side with and under the protecting shadow of that of the 
Emperor ; and such was the increasing influence of the Popes, 
that the majesty of the supreme Pontiff was likely ere long, to 
dim the splendour of the purple. The removal by Constantine 
of the seat of empire from the West, to the East, from the historic 
banks of the Tiber to the beautiful shores of the Bosphorus, 
laid the first broad foundation, of a sovereignty, which in reality 
commences from that momentous change. Practically, almost 
from that day, Rome which had witnessed the birth, the youth, 
the splendour, and the decay, of the mighty race by whom her 
name had been carried with her eagles, to the remotest regions 
of the then known world, was gradually abandoned by the 
inheritors of her renown ; and its people, deserted by the Em- 
perors, and an easy prey to the ravages of the barbarians, whom 
they had no longer the courage to resist, beheld in the bishop 
of Rome, their guardian, their protector, their father. Year by 
year the temporal authority of the Popes, grew into shape and 
hardened into strength ; without violence, without bloodshed, 
without fraud, by the force of overwhelming circumstances, 
fashioned, as if visibly, by the hand of God." 

II. Character. 

The circumstances connected with the origin of the Papacy 
fulfil then the indications of the prophecy. Has the character 
of this power, answered to that attributed to the predicted 
Antichrist ? Certain definite phases of evil, expressly noted in 
the prophetic word, will be considered further on ; but we ask 
now, What has been the general character of the Papal power ? 
If the question were proposed, Do the prophecies of the Messiah 
of Israel, find a fulfilment in Jesus of Nazareth ? it might be 
answered, not only by an appeal to definite predictions exactly 

N 



178 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

fulfilled, but by a comprehensive glance at the general scope 
of the mass of Messianic prophecy. The coming Messiah was 
to be a wondrous supernatural being, endued with heavenly 
power and wisdom, marked by matchless meekness, pure and 
holy, just and merciful, great yet lowly, a sufferer and yet a 
king, a victim and yet a judge, a servant of God, and yet 
Lord of all. By these general features, Jesus Christ was de- 
monstrated to be the hope of Israel, as well as by his being 
born at Bethlehem, and brought up at Nazareth. 

Now the Antichrist has similarity his broad characteristics ; 
his very names imply some of them. He is called " that wicked,"' 
or the lawless one, who sets God's revealed will at defiance ; 
his coming is " after the working of Satan ;" he " opposeth and 
exalteth himself," against God, and against his people. He is 
to be the " man of sin," the outcome of the working of " a 
mystery of iniquity." He is the very opposite of all that is 
holy and good, the oppressor of all that love God, for Satan 
animates him. Further, he is called " the son of perdition," 
and this name, applied by our Lord to Judas Iscariot, the 
traitor, would prepare us to find the man of sin, the Anti- 
christ,* not in some openly and avowedly infidel power, but in 
a professedly Christian one. The "son of perdition" was an 



* " Antichrist " is a name used only in John, in four passages, as fol- 
lows, " Children, it is the last time : and as ye have heard that the Anti- 
christ cometh, even now are there many Antichrists" (i John ii. 18). 
" Who is the liar (6 -J/evo-TTjs) but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? 
This is the Antichrist which denieth the Father and the Son ' (ii. 22). 
" This is the spirit of the Antichrist, respecting which ye have heard that it 
cometh " (I John iv. 3). "Many deceivers are gone forth into the world, who 
confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh ; this is the deceiver and 
the Antichrist." The repeated statements that Christians had heard of the 
coming of this Antichrist, prove that John alludes under this name to the 
•'little horn " of Daniel, and the " man of sin " of Paul. The name itself 
means, not as is sometimes asserted, an avowed antagonist of Christ, but 
one professing to be a Vice- Christ, a rival-Christ, one who would assume 
the character, occupy the place, and fulfil the functions of Christ. The in- 
cipient Antichrists of John's own day, denied the Father and the Son, by 
their false doctrines about them. Etymologically the word does not mean a 
person opposed to Christ, but an opposing Christ, a vice-Christ, one assum- 
ing to be Christ. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 179 

apostate disciple, who betrayed his Lord with a kiss of seeming 
reverence and affection. This name would lead us to expect 
that a Judas character will attach to the great apostacy and its 
head, and lead us therefore to look for it in the professing 
Christian Church, the sphere in which Paul indeed distinctly 
states, that it will be revealed. 

So dark is the moral aspect of the power predicted, what- 
ever it be, that many conceive that no power that ever has 
had an existence, can approach its enormity of guilt and evil ; 
and they look, in consequence, for some future monster of 
iniquity who shall better fulfil the predictions of Scripture. 

When this impression is not the result of ignorance of history, 
it illustrates the mournful facility with which familiarity with 
evil, diminishes its enormity in our sight ; for it may be safely 
asserted that all, not to say more than all, these prophecies 
foretell, has found its realization in the line of Roman Pontiffs. 

It must be remembered that the Popes of Rome are guilty 
before God, not only for all the sins they have committed, but 
for all the sins they have connived at, for all the sins they 
have suggested, for all the sins they have encouraged and 
sanctioned, and, above all, for the sins they have commanded. 
When their personal character and the influence of their 
examples, are considered, when the tendency of the institu- 
tions they have invented and maintained are examined, when 
their bulls and laws are studied, and their effects observed ; 
and when all these results are multiplied, by the extent of 
their dominion, the length of its duration, and the assumption 
of infallibility and Divine authority that accompanied it, the 
impression of unparalleled iniquity produced on the mind, defies 
all power of expression ; language seems too weak to embody 
it, and the words of inspiration seem to fall short of, rather 
than to exceed, the reality. 

Not only have an appalling number of the Roman Pontiffs 
been personally, exceedingly wicked men, as reference to any 
authentic histoiy of the Popedom will show, (so wicked that it 
were a shame even to speak of the things that were done by 



i So FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

them ;) not only have they thus abused their high position, by 
setting examples of sin of the most flagrant kind ; but by their 
laws, exempting their innumerable clergy in all lands from the 
jurisdiction of the civil power, they have protected others in 
sinning in the same way : and they have, by their countless 
sinful and sin-causing enactments and institutions, led others 
into sin, on a scale that it is positively appalling to contem- 
plate. 

Take for instance Papal doctrines and practices on the sub- 
ject of forgiveness of sin — indulgences. The Pope made a 
bargain with sinners, and on certain conditions, such as the 
joining in a crusade, the helping to extirpate so-called heresy, 
the performance of certain pilgrimages, the repetition of pre- 
scribed formulas, or the payment of money, he agreed to give 
them pardons for sin. Finding this traffic singularly lucrative, — 
for what will not men do to indulge in sin with impunity,— it was 
developed into a system of fabulous wickedness. Indulgences 
for the dead, as well as for the living, were freely sold, and 
thus the affections as well as the selfishness of men, were turned 
to account for the replenishment of the papal treasury. Some 
of these indulgences expressly mentioned the very sins, which 
the Scriptures declare, exclude from the kingdom of heaven, 
and bade those who practised them not doubt of eternal sal- 
vation, if they bought a papal indulgence. 

The number of years by which the torments of purgatory 
were to be abridged by some of these indulgences, was extra- 
vagant to the last degree. John XII. granted " ninety thousand 
years of pardon for deadly sins," for the devout repetition of 
three prayers, written in the chapel of the Holy Cross at Rome. 
Indeed, such has been the profligate extravagance with which 
these pardons have been dispensed, and the excessive facility 
with which they may be procured, that if they had been made 
available according to the intention of the Church, then must 
purgatory, again and again, have been swept out, — nay more, it 
must for ever be kept empty, and the sins of all the sinners 
that ever lived, must have been forgiven over and over again. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. i'Si 

The sale of these indulgences for money, was the proximate 
cause of the glorious Reformation. The intense disgust, and 
the utter abhorrence, with which they came to be regarded, 
in consequence of the unblushing effrontery, and shameless 
trickery, connected with their sale, roused all Germany to 
resist their introduction, and stirred up Martin Luther to ex- 
amine into the rotten foundation on which they rested. The 
deeply interesting story must not be told here — how Tetzel the 
indulgence-monger, bearing the bull of Leo X. on a velvet 
cushion, travelled in state from town to town in a gay equipage, 
took his station in the thronged church, and proclaimed to the 
credulous multitudes, " Indulgences are the most precious and 
sublime of God's gifts ; this red cross has as much efficacy as 
the cross of Jesus Christ. Draw near, and I will give you 
letters duly sealed, by which even the sins you shall hereafter 
desire to commit, shall be all forgiven you. There is no sin so 
great that indulgence cannot remit. Pay, only pay largely, 
and you shall be forgiven. But more than all this, indulgences 
save not the living alone, they also save the dead. Ye prie3ts, 
ye nobles, ye tradesmen, ye wives, ye maidens, ye young men, 
hearken to your departed parents and friends, who call to you 
from the bottomless abyss, ' We are enduring horrible torment, 
a small alms would deliver us, you can give it, will you not ? ' 
The moment the money clinks at the bottom of the chest, the 
soul escapes from purgatory, and flies to heaven. With ten 
groschen you can deliver your father from purgatory. Our 
Lord God no longer deals with us as God — he has given all 
power to the Pope." The indulgences sold were in the fol ■ 
lowing form " Our Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on thee, 
M. N. ; and absolve thee by the merits of his most holy suffer- 
ings. I, in virtue of the apostolic power committed to me, ab- 
solve thee from all . . . excesses, sins, and crimes, that thou 
mayest have committed, however great and enormous they may 
be, and of whatever kind. ... I remit the pains thou wouldest 
have had to endure in purgatory, ... I restore thee to the 
innocence and purity of thy baptism, so that at the moment of 



iH2 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

death, the gates of the place of torment shall be shut against 
thee, and the gates of Paradise open to thee. And if thou 
shouldest live long, this grace continueth unchangeable, till the 
time of thy end. In the name of the Father and of the Son 
and of the Holy Ghost, Amen. The brother John Tetzel, 
commissary, hath signed this with his own hand." 

For the wonderful and horrible account of the excesses of 
this abandoned agent of the Popes, we must refer the reader to 
D'Aubigne's History of the great Reformation, and similar works. 

There was a published scale of the prices for which different 
sins could be pardoned ; and that the gain of money was the 
only object was clear, from the enormous price charged for in- 
dulgences for certain crimes, likely to be committed by the rich, 
— crimes only by the laws of the church, — while the grossest 
violations of the law of God were excused for a trifle. The 
royal, and merely conventional crime, of marriage with a first 
cousin, cost ^"iooo, while the terrible sins of wife murder or 
parricide cost only £4. ! 

" The institution of indulgence," says Spanheim, " was the 
mint which coined money, for the Roman Church ; the gold 
mines for the profligate nephews and natural children of the 
Popes ; the nerves of the Papal wars ; the means of liquida- 
ting debt; and the inexhaustible fountain of luxury to the 
Popes." The curse fell on Simon Magus for thinking that the 
gift of God might be purchased with money; what shall we say 
of him, who pretends that he has Divine authority to sell the 
grace of God for money ? Of him, who leads millions of im- 
mortal souls to incur the guilt and curse of Simon Magus, 
under the delusion that they are securing salvation ? and who 
leads them to do this for his own wicked and selfish ends ? Is 
it possible to find guilt of a deeper die, perfidy of a more 
atrociously cruel and satanic character? Even the Jews could 
say, " None can forgive sins save God only ; " what shall we 
say of him who professes to blot out guilt, and remove its 
penalty, from countless thousands who repose unlimited con- 
fidence in him, in order to secure his own evil ends ? 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. i^j 

"Whoso confesseth and forsaketh his sin, shall find mercy ;" 
what shall we say of him who offers boundless mercy, to those 
who so love and cleave to their sins, as to be willing to pay 
enormous prices for permission to commit them? of him 
who makes plenary pardon dependent on mere outward acts, 
prayers, pilgrimages, payments, or even on the commission of 
other gross sins, massacres, extirpation of heretics, etc.? 
The Psalmist prayed " Keep back thy servant from presump- 
tuous sins, O Lord ; " what shall we say of him, who encourages 
to presumptuous sin, by the prospect of plenary pardon at the 
moment of death, on condition of holding a candle, or kissing 
a bead ? 

That this practice is a mighty and effective inducement to 
sin, no one acquainted with human nature, and the operation 
of moral causes, can question : and, worse still, it misrepre- 
sents the atonement of Christ, asserting its insufficiency to 
put away sin ; it denies the boundlessness and freedom of the 
love of God, and of the Gospel of grace, which offers pardon 
without money and without price ; it gives false impressions 
of the true nature of sin, the guilt of which is so great that 
blood-shedding alone can remove it ; it separates what God has 
indissolubly joined, justification and sanctification, providing 
pardon apart from a change of heart ; it conceals from view 
the tribunal of the righteous Judge, and draws men to a fellow- 
man, sinners to a fellow-sinner, for pardon. It is opposed to 
the doctrines of "repentance toward God, and faith in our 
Lord Jesus Christ/' as well as to all practical godliness, and is 
a characteristic creation of " that wicked, whose coming is after 
the working of Satan." 

Its institution and patronage of the Order of the Jesuits is 
another of the exceedingly sinful deeds of the Papacy. This 
Society, which has dared to appropriate to itself the Name 
which is above every name, by calling itself " The Order of 
Jesus," deserves rather, from the nature of its doctrines, and 
from the work it has done in the world, to be called " The 
Order of Satan." Founded by Ignatius Loyola, a Spanish 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



officer, cotemporary with Luther, its great object was, to sub- 
jugate the whole human race, to the power of the Papacy. 
From the book of the " Constitutions " of the Jesuits, we 
obtain the evidence that condemns their Order as a master- 
piece of the father of lies. 

Expediency, in its most licentious form, is the basis of their 
whole system of morality. Their doctrine of " probability ; " 
their doctrine of " mental reservation," by which lying and 
perjury are justified; their doctrine of "intention," which 
renders the most solemn oath of no power to bind a man; 
the way in which, by their glosses, they make void the law of 
God in every one of its precepts, and give licence to every 
crime, not excepting murder, and even parricide, all these render 
their whole system of morals a bottomless abyss of iniquity. 

This is no mere Protestant account of the Jesuits ; their 
extraordinary viciousness, has led to their suppression, and 
expulsion, at various times, by different Catholic sovereigns 
in Europe. In stating their grounds for such action, these 
monarchs give descriptions of Jesuit morality, which could 
scarcely be worse. The Catholic king of Portugal says : 
" It cannot be, but that the licentiousness introduced by the 
Jesuits, of which the three leading features are falsehood, 
murder, and perjury, should give a new character to morals. 
Their doctrines render murder innocent, sanctify falsehood, 
authorize perjury, deprive the laws of their power, destroy the 
submission of subjects, allow individuals the liberty of killing, 
calumniating, lying and forswearing themselves, as their advan- 
tage may dictate ; they remove the fear of Divine and human 
laws, so that Christian and civil society could not exist, where 
they are paramount." 

In 1767 they were expelled from Spain on similar grounds. 
They were also expelled from Venice (1606); from Savoy 
(1729); from France (1764); from Sicily (1767), and from 
various other States. From 1555 to 1773 they suffered no less 
than thirty-seven expulsions, all on account of their iniquitous 
doctrines and evil practices. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 185 

The Catholic University of Paris, in 1643, said of them : 
" The laws of God have been so sophisticated by their unheard- 
of subtleties, that there is no longer any difference between 
vice and virtue ; they promise impunity to the most flagrant 
crimes ; their doctrines are inimical to all order ; and if such 
a pernicious theology were received, deserts and forests would 
be preferable to cities ; and society with wild beasts, who have 
only their natural arms, would be better than society with men, 
who, in addition to the violence of their passions, would be 
instructed by this doctrine of devils, to dissimulate and feign, in 
order to destroy others with greater impunity. // is a device of 
the great enemy of souls." The Parliament of Paris, in 1762, 
used language quite as strong in a memorial to the king, 
accompanying a collection of extracts from 147 Jesuit authors, 
which they presented to him, " that he might be acquainted 
with the wickedness of the doctrine constantly held by the 
Jesuits, from the institution of their Society to the present 
moment— a doctrine authorizing robbery, lying, perjury, im- 
purity ; all passions, and all crimes ; inculcating homicide, 
parricide, and regicide ; overturning religion and sanctioning 
magic, blasphemy, irreligion, and idolatry." 

The book of " secret instructions," generally attributed to 
Lainez, the second Father-general of the Order, contains 
directions so unprincipled, that on the first page it is ordained 
that, if the book fell into the hands of strangers, it was to be 
positively denied that these were the rules of the Society ! 
This book gives directions for the attainment of power, in- 
fluence, and wealth, by means of the vilest intrigues : the vices 
of the rich and great, were to be pandered to in every way ; 
spies were to be diligently sought and liberally rewarded; 
animosities were to be fostered and stirred up among enemies, 
in order to weaken them ; the dying were to be watched as if 
by vultures, and promised cano?iization by the Pope, if they 
would bequeath their property to this Order. Women who 
were found in confession to have bad husbands, were to be 
instructed to withdraw a sum of money secretly, to be given 



186 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

to the Society, as a sacrifice for their husbands' sins. To all 
classes, but especially to the great and rich, any vicious indul- 
gence they desired might be allowed, in order to soothe and 
win them, provided public scandal were avoided. These and 
multitudes of similar injunctions, are based on the doctrine, 
that we may do evil that good may come, that "the end 
sanctifies the means." Scripture says of those who hold and 
teach this doctrine, that their " damnation is just." 

The same principle led Jesuit missionaries into the most 
sinful compromises with heathen superstitions and philosophies 
in different parts of the world. In India they swore that they 
were Brahmins of pure descent, sanctioned some of the most 
abominable habits of idolatry, and practised some of the 
worst Hindu austerities, to acquire fame. In China, they 
pretended that there was only a shade of difference between 
the doctrine of Christ and the teachings of Confucius ; and to 
make proselytes, they taught, instead of pure Christianity, a 
corrupt system of religion and morality, that was quite con- 
sistent with the indulgence of all the passions. Nay, so far 
did they go, that, finding the Crucifixion was a stumbling-block 
to the philosophic Chinese, as to the Jews of old, they actually 
denied that Christ was ever crucified at all, and said it was a 
base calumny invented by the Jews, to throw contempt on the 
Gospel I They told the Red Indians that Jesus Christ was a 
mighty chief, who had scalped more men and women and 
children than any warrior that had ever lived ! Having no 
real principles, they were willing to make any compromise, 
no matter how foul, provided they could by it advance the 
interests of their Order, or swell the roll of recruits to the 
Roman army. 

Now, when we remember that the teachings of these Jesuits 
are not only permitted, but received as standard authorities in 
the Roman Catholic Church, and directly sanctioned by the 
Popes, what shall we say of the so-called Vicar of Christ ? Is 
not this the deceivableness of unrighteousness? Is not this 
the doctrine of devils? And is not he who sanctions and 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 187 

patronizes such an " Order * of Satan, " the lawless one n ? Is 
he not, and does he not richly deserve to be, "a son of 
perdition " ? Is he not a " man of sin " who speaks lies in 
hypocrisy, having his conscience seared with a hot iron ? 
Where, if not here, shall we ever detect the predicted mystery 
of iniquity ? 

That the line of Roman Pontiffs, have been for the most 
part personally wicked men, there can be no doubt ; that 
many of their institutions, besides the two just considered, have 
been fearfully fruitful sources of deep deluges of sin, is also 
unquestionable ; but perhaps nothing more fully warrants the 
application to them of the distinctive title, " The Man of Sin," 
than the fact that they have commanded sin. If Aaron was 
doubly guilty because he led the people to worship the golden 
calf ; if the wickedness of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, is in- 
tensified by the fact that he " caused Israel to sin" what must 
be the dark guilt, and the dreadful doom of those, who have 
led the professing Church of Christ into the foulest idolatry, 
and into sin of every conceivable kind, not only by example, 
not only by false doctrines and evil practice, but also by direct 
commands — commands delivered in the name of the Lord, and 
believed by the people to have Divine authority ; and this not 
to a few, not as an occasional thing, or during a brief period, 
but to all papal Christendom and throughout long ages ! 

This double dyed guilt, lies at the door of the power we are 
considering. Did not the Popes of Rome, for their own 
selfish ends, command, what Scripture forbids, the celibacy of the 
clergy, and thus lead the whole body, in all lands, into disobe- 
dience to God in this respect, a disobedience that was the 
direct cause of the wide-spread and unfathomable flood of 
moral corruption, that deluged Europe for ages ? Have not 
the Popes, times without number, commanded idolatries, 
persecutions, treasons, rebellions, regicides? Any collection 
of papal bulls, presents a very harvest of commands to sin, 
commands which were, alas ! only too faithfully obeyed by 
multitudes. 



188 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

And how often have they prohibited, the very things enjoined 
by God ! Is not this a negative command to sin ? Christ bids 
all men, for instance, " Search the Scriptures/* " prove all things, 
and hold fast that which is good." On no one point, are the 
Popes more resolved to enforce disobedience to the Divine 
will ; in bull after bull they have forbidden the use of the 
Scriptures in their own tongue to the people, saying, " Let it 
be lawful for no man whatever to infringe this declaration of 
our will and command, or to go against it with bold rashness." 
When WicklifFe published his translation, Pope Gregory sent a 
bull to the University of Oxford (1378) condemning the trans- 
lator as having " run into a detestable kind of wickedness." 
When Tyndale published his translation, it was condemned. In 
1546, when Luther was preparing his German version, Leo X. 
published a bull, couched in the most vile and opprobrious 
language. The indignation of Pius VII. (and other Popes) 
against Bible Societies, knows no bounds. He speaks of the 
Bible Society as a " crafty device by which the very founda 
tions of religion are undermined," as " a pestilence dangerous 
to Christianity ; " "a defilement of the faith, eminently dan- 
gerous to souls;" "a nefarious scheme," etc., and strictly 
commands, that every version of the Scriptures into a vulgar 
tongue, without the church's notes, should be placed in the 
Index among prohibited books. Curses are freely bestowed 
on those who assert the liberty of the laity to read the Scrip- 
tures, and every possible impediment is thrown in the way of 
their circulation. Bible burning is a favourite ceremony with 
Papists ; and their ignorance of the real contents of the book, 
is almost incredible. The famous bull " Unigenitus," a.d. 17 13, 
condemns the proposition that " the reading of the Scriptures 
is for everybody " as " false, shocking, scandalous, impious, 
and blasphemous." 

What must be the guilt, in the eyes of God, of the men who 
thus withhold the word, by which alone they can be born 
again, from myriads of perishing sinners, over whose con- 
sciences they have perfect sway 1 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED, 189 

III. Self-exalting Utterances. 

One of the leading characteristics of the power symbolised 
by the " little horn " is " a mouth speaking great things." The 
destruction of the beast is said to be, " because of the great 
words which the little horn spake." The same point is noted 
also in Rev. xiii. 5, where the beast is said to have " a mouth 
speaking great things, and blasphemies."* Paul similarly 
predicts of the man of sin, that he will oppose and exalt 
himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped." 
We must therefore inquire whether self-exalting utterances of a 
peculiarly impious nature, have been a characteristic of the 
Papacy ? We turn to the public documents, issued by various 
Popes, and find, that they have fulfilled in a marvellous way 
this prediction ; the pretensions they have made are blas- 
phemies, the claims they have put forth, are, to be equal, if 
not superior to God Himself; no power on earth has ever 
advanced similar pretensions. 

Fox, in his "Acts and Monuments," gives extracts from 
two hundred and twenty-three authentic documents, compris- 
ing decrees, decretals, extravagants, pontificals, and bulls, all 
of which are indisputable evidence. Twenty pages of small 
type in a large volume, are filled with the " great words " of 
the Popes, taken from these two hundred and twenty-three 
documents alone. What a crop would a complete collection 
of Papal publications afford ! Space forbids many quotations ; 

* " Blasphemy in Scripture means not so much a speaking against God, as 
the assumption of Divine attributes or Divine power where no rightful claim 
to do so exists. Thus, in Matt, ix., the scribes said of Jesus, ' this man 
blasphemeth,' because He said to the sick of the palsy, ' thy sins be for- 
given thee.' Jesus could rightly say so, therefore their charge was false. 
Rome, through her priesthood, can not rightly say so, therefore our charge 
against her is true ; she blasphemeth. Again, in John x. 30-33, we read 
that, when Jesus said, *I and my Father are one/ the Jews took up 
stones to stone Him, saying, 'for agood work we stone Thee not, but for 
blasphemy, and because that Thou, being a man, makest Thyself God.' 
Jesus and his Father were one, therefore the charge of blasphemy was vain ; 
the Pope and God are not one, therefore our charge of blasphemy is true. 
He that says, ' I am the sole last supreme judge of what is right and 
wrong,' blasphemeth." — "Words of the Little Horn," by Rev. H.E.Brooke. 



190 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

let the reader judge of the mass from the following samples, 
which we blend into one, in order to help the conception. If 
" he that exalteth himself shall be abased," what degradation 
can be commensurate with such self-exaltation as this ? 

" Wherefore, seeing such power is given to Peter, and to me in Peter, 
being his successor, who is he then in all the world that ought not to be 
subject to my decrees, which have such power in heaven, in hell, in earth, 
with the quick, and also the dead. ... By the jurisdiction of which 
key the fulness of my power is so great that, whereas all others are subjects 
— yea, and emperors themselves, ought to subdue their executions to me ; 
only I am a subject to no creature, no, not to myself; so that my papal 
majesty ever remaineth undiminished; superior to all men ; whom all persons 
ought to obey, and follow, whom no man must judge or accuse of any crime, 
no man depose but I myself. No man can excommunicate me, yea though 
I commune with the excommunicated, for no canon bindeth me : whom 
no man must lie to, for he that lieth to me is a church robber, and who 
obeyeth not me is a heretic, and an excommunicated person. . . . Thus, 
then, it appeareth, that the greatness of priesthood began in Melchisedec, 
was solemnized in Aaron, continued in the children of Aaron, perfection- 
ated in Christ, represented in Peter, exalted in the universal jurisdiction, 
and manifested in the Pope. So that through this pre-eminence of my priest- 
hood, having all things subject to me, it may seem well verified in me, that 
was spoken of Christ, ' Thou hast subdued all things under his feet, sheep 
and oxen, and all cattle of the field, the birds of heaven, and fish of the 
sea,' etc., where is it to be noted that by oxen, Jews and heretics ; by cattle 
of the field, Pagans be signified. .... By sheep and all cattle, are 
meant all Christian men, both great and less, whether they be emperors, 
princes, prelates, or others. By birds of the air you may understand angels 
and potentates of heaven, who be all subject to me, in that I am greater 
than the angels, and that in four things, as afore declared ; and have power 
to bind and loose in heaven, and to give heaven to them that fight in my 
wars. Lastly, by the fishes of the sea, are signified the souls departed, in 
pain or in purgatory. . . . For, as we read, ' The earth is the Lord's 
and the fulness thereof ; " and, as Christ saith, ' All power is given to 
Him, both in heaven and in earth : ' so it is to be affirmed, that the Vicar 
of Christ hath power on things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, which he 
took immediately of Christ. ... I owe to the emperors no due obe- 
dience that they can claim, but they owe to me, as to their superior ; and, 
therefore, for a diversity betwixt their degree and mine, in their consecra- 
tion they take the unction on their arm, I on the head. And as I am supe- 
rior to them, so am I superior to all laws, and free from all constitutions ; who 
am able of myself, and by my interpretation, to prefer equity not being 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED, 191 



written, before the law written ; having all laws, within the chest of my 
breast, as is aforesaid. . . . What country soever, kingdom, or pro- 
vince, choosing to themselves bishops and ministers, although they agree 
with all other Christ's faithful people in the name of Jesu, that is, in faith 
and charity, believing in the same God, and in Christ, his true Son, and in 
the Holy Ghost, having also the same creed, the same evangelists, and 
scriptures of the apostles ; yet, notwithstanding, unless their bishops and 
ministers take their origin and ordination from this apostolic seat, they are 
to be counted not of the church, so that succession of faith only is not suffi- 
cient to make a church, except the ministers take their ordination from them 
who have their succession from the apostles. . . . And likewise it is to 
be presumed that the bishop of that church is always good and holy. Yea, 
though he fall into homicide or adultery, he may sin, but yet he cannot be 
accused, but rather excused by the murders of Samson, the thefts of the 
Hebrews, etc. All the earth is my diocese, and I the ordinary of all 
men, having the authority of the King of all kings upon subjects. I am 
all in all and above all, so that God Himself, and I, the Vicar of God, 
have both one consistory, and I am able to do almost all that God can do. 
In all things that I list, my will is to stand for reason, for I am able by 
the law to dispense abave the law, and of wrong to make justice in 
correcting laws and changing them. . . . Wherefore, if those things 
that I do be said not to be done of man, but of God : what can you 
make me but God ? Again, if prelates of the Church be called and 
counted of Constantine for gods, I then, being above all prelates, seem by 
this reason to be above all gods. Wherefore, no marvel if it be in my 
power to change time and times, to alter and abrogate laws, to dispense 
with all things, yea, with the precepts of Christ ; for where Christ biddeth 
Peter put up his sword, and admonishes his disciples not to use any out- 
ward force in revenging themselves, do not I, Pope Nicholas, writing to the 
bishops of France, exhort them to draw out their material swords ? And, 
whereas Christ was present Himself at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, 
do not I, Pope Martin, in my distinction, inhibit the spiritual clergy to be 
present at marriage-feasts, and also to marry ? Moreover, where Christ 
biddeth us lend without hope of gain, do not I, Pope Martin, give dispen- 
sation for the same ? What should I speak of murder, making it to be 
no murder or homicide to slay them that be excommunicated ? Like- 
wise, against the law of nature, item against the apostles, also against the 
canons of the apostles, I can and do dispense ; for where they, in their canon, 
command a priest for fornication to be deposed, I, through the authority of 
Silvester, do alter the rigour of that constitution, considering the minds and 
bodies also of men now to be weaker than they were then. . . . If ye 
list briefly to hear the whole number of all such cases as properly do apper- 
tain to my Papal dispensation, which come to the number of one-and-fifty 



192 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

points, that no man may meddle with but only 1 myself alone., I will recite 
them : — 

"The Pope doth canonize saints, and none else but he. 

" His sentence maketh a law. 

* ' He is able to abolish laws, both civil and canon. 

" To erect new religions, to approve or reprove rules or ordinances, and 
ceremonies in the Church. 

" He is able to dispense with all the precepts and statutes of the Church. 

" The same is also free from all laws, so that he cannot incur any sen- 
tence of excommunicatioYi, suspension, irregularity, etc. , etc. 

" After that I have now sufficiently declared my power in earth, in 
heaven, in purgatory, how great it is, and what is the fulness thereof in 
binding, loosing, commanding, permitting, electing, confirming, disposing, 
dispensing, doing and undoing, etc., I will speak now a little of my riches 
and of my great possessions, that every man may see by my wealth, and 
abundance of all things, rents, tithes, tributes, my silks, my purple mitres, 
crowns, gold, silver, pearls and gems, lands and lordships. For to me per- 
taineth first the imperial city of Rome ; the palace of Lateran ; the king- 
dom of Sicily is proper to me, Apulia and Capua be mine. Also the king- 
dom of England and Ireland, be they not, or ought they not to be, tribu- 
taries to me ? To these I adjoin also, besides other provinces and coun- 
tries, both in the Occident and Orient, from the north to the south, these 
dominions by name (here follows a long list). What should I speak here 
of my daily revenues, of my first-fruits, annates, palls, indulgences, bulls, 
confessionals, indults and rescripts, testaments, dispensations, privileges, 
elections, prebends, religious houses, and such like, which come to no small 
mass of money ? . . . whereby what vantage cometh to my coffers it 
may partly be conjectured. . . . But what should I speak of Germany, 
when the whole world is my diocese, as my canonists do say, and all men 
are bound to believe ; except they will imagine (as the Manichees do) two 
beginnings, which is false and heretical? For Moses saith, In the beginning 
God made heaven and earth ; and not, In the beginnings. Wherefore, as 
I began, so I conclude, commanding, declaring, and pronouncing, to stand 
UPON NECESSITY OF SALVATION, FOR EVERY HUMAN CREATURE TO BE 
SUBJECT TO ME." 

Add to these utterances, which might be multiplied by the 
thousand, the usual formula of investiture with the papal tiara : 
" Receive this triple crown, and know that thou art the father 
of princes, and the king and ruler of the world" And in proof 
that the claims here advanced are no obsolete mediaeval 
assumptions, abandoned in modern times, but the unchange- 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



able voice of the Papacy, take a few " great words " from a 
comparatively recent sermon of the principal representative of 
Rome in England, Cardinal Manning, who puts the following 
similar language into the mouth of the Pope. 

" You say I have no authority over the Christian world, that 
I am not the Vicar of the Good Shepherd, that I am not the 
supreme interpreter of the Christian faith. I am all these. 
You ask me to abdicate, to renounce my supreme authority. 
You tell me I ought to submit to the civii power, that I am 
the subject of the King of Italy, and from him I am to receive 
instructions as to the way I should exercise the civil power. 
I say I am liberated from all civil subjection, that my Lord 
made me the subject of no one on earth, king or otherwise ; 
that in his right I am Sovereign. I acknowledge no civil 
superior. I am the subject of no prince, and I claim more 
than this. I claim to be the Supreme Judge and director of 
the consciences of men ; of the peasant that tills the field, and 
the prince that sits on the throne ; of the household that lives 
in the shade of privacy, and the Legislature that makes laws 
for kingdoms. I am the sole, last, Supreme Judge of what is 
right and wrong." 

In full harmony with this assumption is the new definition 
of Papal infallibility : " The Roman Pontiff, when he speaks 
* ex cathedra/ that is, when, in discharge of his office of pas- 
tor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme 
apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith and 
morals, to be held by the universal church, he enjoys infallibility, 
and that therefore such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are 
irreformable of themselves, and not from the consent of the 
church. And if any one presume to contradict this definitisn, 
let him be anathema." 

But actions speak louder than words ! The Popes have not 
confined their self-exaltation to empty boastings. They have 
practically exalted themselves " above all that is called God, 
or that is worshipped." The following is extracted from the 
" Ceremoniale Romanum," and describes the first public 

o 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



appearance of the Pope in St. Peter's, on his election to the 
Pontificate. After the investiture with the scarlet papal robes, 
the vest covered with pearls, and the mitre studded with 
precious stones, the new Pope is conducted to the altar, before 
which he prostrates himself in prayer, bowing as before the 
seat of God. An awful sequel then follows. We read : " The 
Pope rises, and, wearing his mitre, is lifted up by the cardinals, 
and is placed by them upon the altar to sit there. One of the 
bishops kneels, and begins the Te Deum. In the mean time the 
cardinals kiss the feet and hands and face of the Pope." This 
ceremony is commonly called by Roman Catholic writers 
" The adoration ; " it has been observed for many centuries, 
and was performed at the inauguration of Pius IX. A coin has 
been struck in the papal mint which represents it, and the 
legend is, "Quern creant adorant," "whom they create (Pope) 
they adore." The language in which this adoration is couched 
is blasphemous to a degree. At the coronation of Pope 
Innocent X. Cardinal Colonna on his knees, in his own name 
and that of the clergy of St. Peter's, addressed the following 
words to the Pope : " Most holy and blessed father, head of 
the church, ruler of the world, to whom the keys of the 
kingdom of heaven are committed, whom the angels in heaven 
revere, and the gates of hell fear, and all the world adores, we 
specially venerate, worship, and adore thee." 

The very assumption the Pope makes, to be Christ's Vicar 
involves self-exaltation. How should one representing the 
Judge of all be judged by any ? He might make laws, but he 
held himself above all law. Was not Christ King of kings 
and Lord of lords ? How then could he, the representative of 
Christ, do other than regard all kings, and rulers, and potentates, 
as his subjects, to be crowned and uncrowned by him at his 
pleasure? His dominion he likened to that of the sun, all 
other dominion being like that of the moon and satellites, 
immeasurably inferior. Pope Celestine III,, when crowning 
Hemy VI., expressed in action his sense of his own superiority 
to all monarchs : "The Lord Pope sat in the pontifical chair, 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 195 

holding the golden imperial crown between his feet ; and the 
Emperor, bending his head, and the Empress, received the 
crown from the feet of the Lord Pope. But the Lord Pope in- 
stantly struck with his foot the Emperor's crown, and cast it 
upon the ground, signifying that he had the power of deposing 
him, from the empire, if he were undeserving of it. The car- 
dinals lifted up the crown, and placed it upon the Emperor's 
head." 

" Is not the king of England my bondslave ? " said Innocent 
VI. " Hath not God set me as a prince over all nations, to 
root out and to pull down, to destroy and to build?" asks 
Boniface VIII. The glorious declarations of the world-wide 
homage yet to be paid to Messiah the Prince, have been 
applied by the Popes as descriptive of the respect due by 
earthly monarchs to them : " All kings shall fall down'before 
Him, all nations shall serve Him;" and since Christ was God, 
and he was Christ's representative and Vicar, was he not also 
to be regarded by men as God ? Even to this height of 
blasphemy and folly did Antichrist push his pretensions. 
Witness the address of Marcellus to the Pope at the Lateran 
Council : " Thou art another God on earth ; " and the oft-ac- 
cepted title, " Our Lord God the Pope." And since the Pope 
by his power of transubstantiation can even make God, and by 
his power of ordination can enable his countless priests to do 
the same, is he not in a sense the superior of God Himself? 
What adoration can be too profound for one exalted so high ? 
Such worship is accepted by the Roman Pontiffs. 

We read, " great is the mystery of godliness ; God was 
manifest in the flesh," the Most High stooped and made 
Himself of no reputation. May we not say, in considering 
the self-exaltation of the Popes of Rome, great is the " mystery 
of iniquity," man, sinful, mortal man, exalting himself to be 
as God ! And strange to say, men allowed it : " All the 
world wondered after the beast." It was no empty boast of 
Gregory II. : "All the kings of the West reverence the Pope 
as a god on earth." Sismondi describes how Pepin and the 



tq6 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

Franks received him " as a divinity." The mighty Emperor 
Charlemagne consented to receive his title and empire as a 
donation from the Pope; and ere long the coronation oath 
of Western kings came to include a vow, to be " faithful and 
submissive to the Pope." Kings and emperors consented, 
like our own John, and like the Emperor Otho, and many 
others, to hold their dominions as vassals of the Pope, and 
to resign them at his bidding : to hold his stirrup, and lead 
his palfrey, like servants, to kiss his feet and bow in his 
presence like slaves. In his full fame, and flushed with victory, 
the great Francis I., of France, in his interview with Leo X. at 
Bologna, just before the Reformation, "knelt three times in 
approaching him, and then kissed his feet." The Emperor 
Henry of Germany, driven to the most abject humiliation by 
the terror of a papal interdict, sought pardon, barefoot and 
clothed in sack-cloth, and was kept waiting three wintry days 
and nights at the doors of the supreme Pontiff, ere he could 
secure an interview. 

It is difficult in this nineteenth century to credit the records 
which reveal, the unbounded power of the Pope during the 
dark ages, and the nature and extent of the claims he 
asserted, to the reverence and subjection of mankind. If kings 
and emperors yielded him abject homage, the common people 
regarded him as a deity. His dogmas were received as oracles, 
his bulls and sentences were to them the voice of God. The 
Sicilian ambassadors prostrated themselves before Pope Mar- 
tin, with the thrice-repeated cry, " Lamb of God, that takest 
away the sins of the world." " The people think of the Pope 
as the one God that has power over all things, in earth and in 
heaven," said Gerston. The fifth Lateran Council subscribed, 
just before the Reformation, a decree which declared, that " as 
there was but one body of the church, so there was but one 
head, viz., Christ's Vicar, and that it was essential to the salva- 
tion of every human being to be subject to the Roman Pontiff." 

" Every spiritual as well as every ecclesiastical office of 
Christ, was arrogated to himself by the * man of sin.' " " If 



199 
10RET0LD AND FULFILLED. 

. . ld .^ 

Christ was the universal Shepherd of souls, was not he, ^ 
Pope, the same ? If Christ was the door of the sheep, was- 
not he the door? If Christ was the truth, was not he the 
depositary, source, and oracular expounder of the truth, 
authoritative, infallible, independent of Scripture, and even 
against it ? If Christ was the Holy One, was not he the same, 
and did not the title, his holiness, distinctively and alone belong 
to him? If Christ was the husband of the Church, was not he 
the same ? With the marriage ring in the ceremonial of his 
inauguration he signified it; and with his great voice in his 
canon law and papal bulls he proclaimed it to the world. The 
power of the keys of Christ's Church and kingdom, given him, 
extended into the invisible world. He opened with them, and 
who might shut ? He shut, and who might open ? . . . the 
souls in purgatory and the angels in heaven were subject to him ; 
and it was even his prerogative to add to the celestial choir ; by 
his canonizing edicts he elevated whom he pleased of the dead 
to form part of heaven's hierarchy, and become objects of 
adoration to men." * 

IV. Subtleties, False Doctrines, and Lying Wonders. 

The foregoing are not the only characteristics which lead 
the careful student of Scripture and of history, to recognise in 
the Papacy, the great predicted power of evil, that was to arise 
in the latter times of the fourth great empire, and fix its seat 
at Rome. The coming of the Antichrist was to be " with all 
power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceivable- 
ness of unrighteousness." We must inquire whether this mark 
has been visibly impressed on the papal dynasty, whether 
subtleties, false doctrines, and lying wonders, have been an 
essential part of its policy. Again the abundance of evidence 
alone makes reply difficult ! 

Macaulay says : " It is impossible to deny, that the polity of 
the Church of Rome, is the very masterpiece of human zvisdom. 
In truth nothing but such a polity could, against such assaults, 

* Elliott, "Hone," III., p. 161, condensed. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 
196 



e borne up such doctrines. The experience of twelve 
nundred eventful years, the ingenuity and patient care of forty 
generations of statesmen, have improved that polity to such 
perfection, that among the contrivances which have been devised 
for deceiving and oppressing mankind, it occupies the highest place. 
The stronger our conviction that reason and Scripture were 
decidedly on the side of Protestantism, the greater is the re- 
luctant admiration with which we regard that system of tactics 
against which reason and Scripture were employed in vain." 
This wonderful policy of the Papacy may be viewed as an ex- 
pression of Satanic genius, if we may use the expression, or as 
a fruit of human genius. Regarded as " the working of Satan," 
it is in perfect harmony with all the other workings, of him, 
who has been a liar from the beginning. It has been by 
means of a counterfeit Christianity that Satan has, through 
the Papacy, resisted the spread of true Christianity. The 
Papacy has its counterfeit high priest, the Pope ; its counter- 
feit sacrifice, the mass; its counterfeit Bible, tradition; its 
counterfeit mediators, the Virgin, the saints, and angels ; the 
forms have been copied, the realities set aside. Satan in- 
augurated and developed a system, not antagonistic to 
Christianity, but a counterfeit of it ; and as Jannes and 
Jambres withstood Moses, so (i.e., by wiitatio?i) he has with- 
stood Christ. 

But viewed as a fabrication of human ambition and wicked- 
ness, the subtlety with which the Papacy has adapted itself to 
its end, is a marvel of genius. That end was, to exalt a man, 
and a class of men, the Pope and his priesthood, to the supreme 
and absolute control of the world and all its affairs ; to reign, 
not only over the bodies, but over the minds of men. To 
attain this object it employed a policy, unmatched in dissimu- 
lation and craft, a sagacity distinguished by largeness of con- 
ception combined with attention to detail, irresistible energy, 
indomitable perseverance, and, when art was unavailing, over- 
whelming physical force. 

In the selection of Rome as its seat of empire, the Papacy 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 199 

secured enormous prestige. " In no other spot, would its 
gigantic schemes of dominion have been formed, or, if formed, 
realized. Sitting in the seat which the masters of the world 
had so long occupied, the Papacy appeared the rightful heir of 
their power. Papal Rome, reaped the fruit of the wars and 
the conquests, the toils and the blood, of Imperial Rome. 
The one had laboured and gone to her grave, the other 
arose and entered into her labours. The Pontiffs were per- 
petually reminding the world, that they were the successors 
of the Caesars, that the two Romes were linked by an indis- 
soluble bond, and that to the latter had descended the heritage 
of glory and dominion acquired by the former. . . . The 
Pontiffs also claimed to be successors of the Apostles : a more 
masterly stroke of policy still. As the successor of Peter, 
the Pope was greater, than as the successor of Caesar. The 
one made him a king, the other made him king of kings ; 
the one gave him the power of the sword, the other invested 
him with the still more sacred authority of the keys. . . . 
The Papacy is the ghost of Peter crowned with the shadowy 
diadem of the old Caesars." * 

Every doctrine and dogma of the Papacy is framed with a 
similar design, to exalt the priesthood, at the expense of the 
intellect, the conscience, and the eternal well-being, of man- 
kind. By the doctrine of tradition, the priest becomes the 
channel of Divine revelation, and by that of inherent efficacy in 
the sacraments, the channel of Divine grace : men are wholly 
dependent on the priesthood, for a knowledge of the will of 
God, and an enjoyment of the salvation of God. 

Recognising that no religion enjoining a high morality could 
ever be a popular one, in a world of sinners, who love sin, the 
Papacy presented a religion of ritual observance, instead of one 
of spiritual power : heaven could be secured by outward acts ; 
obedience to the church, not a change of heart, was the great 
essential of salvation. Men naturally seek to earn heaven; 

* Wylie's " Papacy," p. 414. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



Popery sets them to work to do so, teaching salvation by merit, 
and denying salvation by faith. " It provides convents for the 
ascetic and the mystic ; carnivals for the gay ; missions for the 
enthusiast ; penances for the man suffering from remorse ; 
sisterhoods of mercy for the benevolent ; crusades for the 
chivalrous; secret missions for the man whose genius lies in 
intrigue; the Inquisition, with its racks and screws, for the 
cruel bigot ; indulgences for the man of wealth and pleasure ; 
purgatory to awe the refractory, and frighten the vulgar ; and a 
subtle theology for the casuist and the dialectitian." * Its 
marvellous flexibility, its adaptation of its doctrines to all classes 
and conditions of men, is one phase of the exceeding sultlety of 
the Papacy. Many others might be adduced, as for instance 
its encouragement of ignorance, in the people, in order to the 
production and maintenance of that superstition, which alone 
makes spiritual imposture easy or even practicable. 

The absurd and childish doctrine of purgatory, unknown in 
the church till the end of the sixth century, could never have 
obtained currency, but for the aid of fictitious miracles, — 
visions of departed persons broiling on gridirons, roasting on 
spits shivering in water, or burning in fire, etc. Such " lying 
wonders" were therefore freely invented by the priests, and 
readily credited by the people ; and by their means the doctrine, 
which was one of the most lucrative ever invented, was soon 
firmly established. Time would fail us, to speak of the " lying 
wonders " connected with the relics, shrines of pilgrimage, and 
false miracles of the Papacy : their name is legion, and their 
folly is exceeded by their guilt. 

V. Persecutions. 

We must pass on to note its persecutions of the saints, for in 
the prophecies of Antichrist under consideration, this feature 
is prominently conspicuous. Daniel says of the " little horn " 
that "he shall wear out the saints of the Most High, and they 
shall be given into his hand." And John says, " It was given 



* Wylie's " Papacy," p. 414. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 201 

him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them," and 
that he " opened his mouth to blaspheme," or speak evil of 
them. 

Now it is a notorious fact that the Church of Rome con- 
siders heresy {i.e., any dissent from her teachings,) the worst 
crime of which a man can be guilty ; she asserts that no heretic 
can be saved. She teaches that no faith is to be kept with 
heretics, that they are to be cut off from all social intercourse, 
deprived of all natural, civil, and political rights; that they 
forfeit all claim and right to their property ; that they are to be 
put to death, and that if they have died a natural death, their 
very bones and dust are to be taken up and burnt. And who 
are to be regarded as heretics? Let the bull In Ccena 
Domini (or, "at the supper of the Lord") answer. Every 
Thursday of Passion Week, that is the day before Good 
Friday, this bull is read in the presence of the Pope, Car- 
dinals, Bishops, and a crowd of people. His Holiness appears 
with a pair of peacock's feathers, one on each side of his head, 
and when the bull is finished, flings a lighted torch into the 
court of the palace, to make the effect of the anathema the 
more dreadful. The object of the bull, as denned by Pope 
Paul III., is "to preserve the purity of the Christian re- 
ligion, and to maintain the unity of the faithful." The 
following is one of its clauses. "We excommunicate and 
anathematize in the name of God Almighty, Father, Son, 
and Holy Ghost, and by the authority of the blessed Apostles, 
Peter and Paul, and by our own, all Hussites, Wickliffites, 
Lutherans, Zuinglians, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Huguenots, Trini- 
tarians, and apostates from the faith, and all other heretics, 
by whatsoever name they are called, and of whatsoever 
sect they be, as also their adherents, receivers, favourers, 
and generally all defenders of them ; together with all who 
without our authority, or that of the Apostolic See, know- 
ingly read, keep, print, or any way for any cause whatsoever, 
publicly or privately, on any Pretext or colour, defend their 
books, containing heresy or treating of religion." 



202 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

These are the principles of Popery, as stated by acknowledged 
authorities of her church, and pronounced applicable to all 
times. 

As to the practice of this unchangeable church, there is not a 
statement in the following quotation which history does not abund- 
antly substantiate. "As some luxurious emperors of Rome ex- 
hausted the whole art of pleasure, so that a reward was promised 
to any who should invent a new one ; so have Romish perse- 
cutors exhausted all the art of pain, so that it will now be diffi- 
cult to discover or invent a new kind of it, which they have 
not already practised upon those marked out for heretics. They 
have been shot, stabbed, stoned, drowned, beheaded, hanged, 
drawn, quartered, impaled, burnt, or buried alive, roasted 
on spits, baked in ovens, thrown into furnaces, tumbled 
over precipices, cast from the tops of towers, sunk in mire and 
pits, starved with hunger and cold, hung on tenter hooks, sus- 
pended by the hair of the head, by the hands or feet, stuffed 
and blown up with gunpowder, ripped with swords and sickles, 
tied to the tails of horses, dragged over streets and sharp flints, 
broken on the wheel, beaten on anvils with hammers, blown 
with bellows, bored with hot irons, torn piecemeal by red-hot 
pincers, slashed with knives, hacked with axes, hewed with 
chisels, planed with planes, pricked with forks, stuck from head 
to foot with pins, choked with water, lime, rags, urine, excre- 
ments, or mangled pieces of their own bodies crammed down 
their throats, shut up in caves and dungeons, tied to stakes, 
nailed to trees, tormented with lighted matches, scalding oil, 
burning pitch, melted lead, etc. They have been flayed alive, 
had their flesh scalped and torn from their bones ; they have 
been trampled and danced upon, till their bowels have been 
forced out, their guts have been tied to trees and pulled forth 
by degrees ; their heads twisted with cords till the blood, or 
even their eyes started out ; strings have been drawn through 
their noses, and they led about like swine, and butchered like 
sheep. To dig out eyes, tear off nails, cut off ears, lips, 
tongues, arms, breasts, etc., has been but ordinary sport with 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 203 

Rome's converters and holy butchers. Persons have been 
compelled to lay violent hands on their dearest friends, to kill 
or to cast into the fire their parents, husbands, wives, children, 
etc., or to look on whilst they have been most cruelly and 
shamefully abused. Women and young maids have also suf- 
fered such barbarities, accompanied with all the imaginable 
indignities, insults, shame, and pungent pangs, to which their 
sex could expose them. Tender babes have been whipped, 
starved, drowned, stabbed, and burnt to death, dashed against 
trees and stones, torn limb from limb, carried about on the 
point of spikes and spears, and thrown to the dogs and swine." 
If such treatment as this, inflicted on successive generations 
of disciples of Christ, for centuries together, be not " wearing 
out the saints of the Most High," what could be ? History 
affords no parallel, for the Pagan persecutions were brief in 
comparison to the Papal. 

The following is one of the authorized curses, published 
in the Romish Pontifical, to be pronounced on heretics by 
Romish priests, " May God Almighty and all his saints 
curse them, with the curse with which the devil and his angels 
are cursed. Let them be destroyed out of the land of the 
living. Let the vilest of deaths come upon them, and let them 
descend alive into the pit. Let their seed be destroyed from 
the earth ; by hunger, and thirst, and nakedness, and all distress, 
let them perish. May they have all misery, and pestilence, 
and torment. Let all they have be cursed. Always and 
everywhere let them be cursed. Speaking and silent let 
them be cursed. Within and without let them be cursed. By 
land and by sea let them be cursed. From the crown of 
the head to the sole of the foot, let them be cursed. Let 
their eyes become blind, let their ears become deaf, let their 
mouth become dumb, let their tongue cleave to their jaws, let 
not their hands handle, let not their feet walk. Let all the 
members of the body be cursed. Cursed let them be standing, 
lying, from this time forth for ever ; and thus let their candle 
be extinguished in the presence of God, at the day of judgment 



204 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 



Let their burial be with dogs and asses. Let hungry wolves 
devour their corpses. Let the devil and his angels be their 
companions for ever. Amen, amen ; so be it, so let it be." 

Entire volumes would be requisite to give an adequate idea 
of the way in which the Papacy has worn out and overcome 
the saints of the Most High, by her cruel persecutions. The 
Apocalypse presents us with two great companies of martyrs 
(Rev. vi. 9 ; xv. 2) one slain by Pagan Emperors, on account 
of their testimony against heathen idolatry ; the other slain by 
Christian Popes, on account of their testimony against Chris- 
tian idolatry, against the corruptions and false doctrines of 
the Papacy. The latter company in number enormously 
exceeds the former; it cannot be numbered by hundreds, or 
by thousands, or by tens of thousands, or by hundreds of 
thousands, or even by millions ; we must rise to tens of 
millions, to express the multitude of the saints of Christ, 
whose blood has been shed, by the self-styled Vicar of Christ 
on earth ! 

The Inquisition, — a name at which humanity has learned 
to shudder, — is a long and supremely cruel and wicked his- 
tory compressed into one word ! Instituted for the avowed 
purpose of suppressing heresy, it was established in every 
country which submitted to Papal authority. In Spain 
alone it has been proved by the careful statistical investi- 
gations of Llorente, that between the years 1481 and 1808 
over three hundred a?id forty-one thousand persons were con- 
demned by this " Holy Office," of whom 31,912 were burned 
alive, 17,000 burned in effigy, and nearly 300,000 tortured and 
condemned to severe penances. Every Catholic country in 
Europe, Asia, and America, had its Inquisition, and its con- 
sequent unexplained arrests, indefinitely long imprisonments of 
innocent persons, its secret investigations, its horrible torture 
chambers, and dreadful dungeons, its auto da fes, or burnings 
of obstinate heretics, and its thousand nameless cruelties and 
injustices. 

When the French took Toledo, and broke open the In- 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 205 

quisition prison there, we read, " Graves seemed to open, and 
pale figures like ghosts issued from dungeons which emitted a 
sepulchral odour. Bushy beards hanging down over the breast, 
and nails grown like birds' claws, disfigured the skeletons, who 
with labouring bosoms inhaled, for the first time for a long 
series of years, the fresh air. Many of them were reduced to 
cripples, the head inclined forward, and the arms and hands 
hanging down, rigid and helpless : they had been confined in 
dens so low they could not rise up in them : ... in spite 
of all the care of the surgeons, many of them expired the same 
day. The light of the sun made a particularly painful impres- 
sion on the optic nerve. . . . On the following day General 
Lasalle minutely inspected the place, attended by several 
officers of his staff. The number of machines for torture . . . 
thrilled even men inured to the battle-field with horror ; only 
one of these, unique in its kind for refined cruelty, seems 
deserving of more particular notice. 

"In a recess in a subterraneous vault, contiguous to the 
private hall for examinations, stood a wooden figure, made by 
the hands of monks, and representing the Virgin Mary. A 
gilded glory encompassed her head, and in her right hand she 
held a banner. It struck us all, at first sight, as suspicious, 
that, notwithstanding the silken robe, descending on each 
side in ample folds from her shoulders, she should wear a 
sort of cuirass. On closer scrutiny, it appeared that the 
fore part of the body was stuck full of extremely sharp nails 
and small narrow knife-blades, with the points of both turned 
towards the spectator. The arms and hands were jointed ; 
and machinery behind the partition set the figure in motion. 
One of the servants of the Inquisition was compelled, by 
command of the General, to work the machine, as he termed 
it. When the figure extended her arms, as though to press 
some one most lovingly to her heart, the well-filled knapsack 
of a Polish grenadier was made to supply the place of a 
living victim. The statue hugged it closer and closer; and 
when the attendant, agreeably to orders, made the figure un- 



206 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

clasp her arms and return to her former position, the knap- 
sack was perforated to the depth of two or three inches, and 
remained hanging on the points of the nails and knife-blades. 
To such an infernal purpose, and in a building erected in 
honour of the true faith, was the Madonna rendered sub- 
servient !" 

Gigantic enterprises of extermination of Christian confes- 
sors were from time to time undertaken by the Popes of Rome. 
Witness the bloody " crusade," against the Albigenses, de- 
scribed by Sismondi, and the religious wars against the Wal- 
denses, narrated by Monastier and others. Pope Alexander 
III. began the persecution against these " saints," whose only 
crime was, that they held the truth of the Gospel and read the 
Scriptures ; he confined himself to excommunications, anathe- 
mas, and decrees, by which they were rendered incapable of 
holding offices of trust, honour, or profit, and by which their 
lands were seized, and their goods confiscated. Innocent III., 
finding that they grew and prospered in spite of this, instigated 
sterner repressive measures ; and the fierce and bloodthirsty 
cruelty with which his behests were obeyed, has added to 
history one of its very darkest chapters. 

The populous and beautiful Val Louise (Dauphiny) was 
deserted on the approach of the Papal army, the Waldenses 
fleeing to the caves of the mountains. They were followed, 
caught, thrown headlong over the precipices, dashed to pieces ; 
others who took refuge in caves where their persecutors could 
not follow them, were suffocated with the smoke of huge fires, 
lit in the cavern's mouth ; 3000 men, women, and children, 
with 400 infants, were found so smothered in one cave, at one 
time ! At the Lateran Council, a.d. 1179, a decree was issued 
against all heretics of whatever name, anthematizing them, and 
forbidding any to harbour them while alive, or give them 
Christian burial when dead. Lucius III. gave them up to the 
secular arm, and to the Inquisition, for detection and suppres- 
sion. Innocent III. charged every bishop to gird himself for 
the work of extermination, and to employ both princes and 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 207 

populace in the cause. Then followed the proclamation of a 
Crusade, with all its horrors, against the faithful witnesses for 
the truth. At the siege and sack of Beziers alone, sixty thou- 
sand Protestants were slain, and this was a specimen of the 
whole crusade. Vassals, were by the Pope absolved from 
allegiance to their superiors, should these latter refuse to join 
in the work of extermination ; the lands and goods of heretics, 
were given to their murderers ; and plenary indulgence to the 
day of death, was granted to every one taking part in the 
persecution. 

The dreadful sufferings inflicted on the peaceful and in- 
dustrious Vaudois, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
are too well known to need repetition. The wretched 
villagers, surprised in the night, and hunted from rock to 
rock, by the light of the flames which were consuming their 
homes, escaped one snare, to fall into another. Surrender 
did not save the men from slaughter, nor the women from 
brutal outrage at which nature revolts ! All were forbidden 
to afford succour to the fugitives. At Cabrieres more than 700 
men were butchered in cold blood, and the women were burned 
alive in their houses. 

The "bloody ordinance of Gastaldo," issued in 1655, de- 
creed, that all who would not embrace the Catholic faith, must 
quit the valleys within a few days. Upwards of 1000 families 
were driven by this edict from their homes, in the depth of 
winter, to the shelterless recesses of the Alpine heights. The 
general to whom the execution of the edict was entrusted, 
fearing the consequences, if the Vaudois should resist in the 
defiles of their mountain passes, resorted to treachery, per- 
suaded the villages, by fair promises, to receive his 15,000 
soldiers in small detachments \ and when the simple, unsuspi- 
cious people, complied with his desire, he ordered the massacre, 
which filled Protestant Europe with horror. Four thousand 
victims suffered death, under cruelties too horrible to relate, 
and the carnage was repeated in valley after valley. 

In 1686, a fresh persecution was organised against the re- 



2o8 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

maining Vaudois, by the Duke of Savoy ; terrible devastation 
was carried again into their quiet vales ; unheard-of barbarities 
committed, on every age and sex ; life could be saved only by 
submission to overwhelming force, and a remnant did submit. 
The whole Protestant population were consigned to prison, 
and their lands, houses, and possessions, were divided among 
the Catholic soldiers of Victor Amadeus. The gaols were so 
crowded, and the treatment of the prisoners so cruel, that 
multitudes of the poor captives perished ; they slept on bare 
bricks, in dungeons thronged to suffocation, in the intense heat 
of summer; and the disease and death engendered were 
horrible in the extreme, so that in six months only 3000 of 
the Vaudois survived. Urgent representations from the Pro- 
testant powers of Europe, procured the liberation of this 
remnant ; but the "wretched exiles were sent out destitute, after 
having been, in many cases, deprived of their children, and of 
their pastors. They turned their steps to Switzerland, and had 
to make their way over the Alps, in the depth of winter ; 
hundreds perished of cold and hunger on the road. Three 
years later, a little band of eight hundred of these intrepid 
exiles, made their way back to their valleys, under the leader- 
ship of Arnaud, who himself recounts their triumph over 
apparently insuperable difficulties. * 

Is further proof of the persecuting spirit of the Roman Pon- 
tiffs needed? Look at Ireland in 1641, when the Romanist 
Bishops, proclaimed a "war of religion," and incited the 
people by every means in their power, to massacre the Pro- 
testants. North, south, east, and west, throughout the island, 
Protestant blood flowed in rivers ; houses were reduced to 
ashes, villages and towns all but destroyed, in the deadly 
strife; the very cattle of the Protestants were inhumanly 
tortured; the only burial allowed to the martyrs was the 
burial of the living, and their persecutors took a fiendish 
delight, in hearing their cries and groans, issuing from the 

* " Glorieuse Rentree des Vaudois dans leurs Vallees " : Arnaud. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 209 

earth. Popish children were taught to pluck out the eyes of 
their Protestant playmates, to hack their little limbs, and hunt 
them to death. Some were forced to murder their own re- 
latives, and then butchered themselves over the bleeding 
remains ; the last sounds that reached their dying ears, being 
the savage assurances of the priests, that these agonies were 
but the commencement of eternal torment. Dublin alone 
escaped, and became a refuge for the distressed, but all its 
Popish inhabitants were forbidden, under pain of the direst 
curse, to afford the slightest succour to the sufferers. Thou- 
sands died of cold and hunger ; thousands more emigrated, 
and perished in the* wintry weather, from hunger and exposure* 

In Armagh, four thousand Protestants were drowned; in 
Cavan, the road for twelve miles together was stained red 
with the gory track of the wounded fugitives ; sixty children 
were abandoned in the flight, by parents fiercely hunted by the 
blood-hounds of the Papacy, who declared that any who helped 
or even buried these little ones, should be buried by their 
sides ; seventeen adults were buried alive at Fermanagh, and 
in Kilkenny seventy-two. In the province of Ulster alone, 
upwards of one hundred and fifty-four thousand Protestants, 
were massacred or expelled from Ireland. O'Niel, the Romish 
Primate of all Ireland, declared this rebellion to be " a pious 
and lawful war;" and Pope Urban VIII., by a bull, dated 
May, 1643, granted "full and absolute remission of all their 
sins," to those who had taken part in " gallantly doing what 
in them lay, to extirpate and wholly root out, the pestiferous 
leaven of heretical contagion." * 

But France was the scene of the greatest national crime 
which even the Papacy has ever instigated and approved, the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, planned by the 
infamous Catherine de Medicis, and ordered by her weak 
and wretched son, Charles IX. The horrible story of this 
unparalleled atrocity, is too well known to need recounting 

* " History of the Attempts of the Irish Papists to Extirpate the Protest- 
ants in the kingdom of Ireland." By Sir John Temple, Master of the Rolls. 

P 



210 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

here. In Paris alone the blood of over ten thousand innocent 
Protestant citizens, deluged the streets, and for a whole week 
the shouts of "Kill, kill," resounded on every hand. In 
Rouen from one to two thousand were slaughtered ; and a 
similar number at Lyons, at Orleans five hundred ; every 
town and village became a scene of carnage. Some writers 
compute that at least one hundred thousand persons fell in 
this terrible massacre; others put the number lower. At 
the most moderate calculation, thirty to forty thousand Pro- 
testants, perished on account of their faith, in that fatal 
month of August, 1572. All the Princes of Europe ex- 
pressed their indignation at the foul treachery, excepting the 
King of Spain and the Pope. The former wrote to congratu- 
late Charles IX., on the "triumph of the Church militant," 
which his conduct had secured. The Pope, Gregory XIIL, 
who was privy to the plot, celebrated a Te Deum on hearing 
the news, ordered a jubilee, and a solemn procession, which 
he accompanied himself, to thank God for this glorious 
success ; he sent a nuncio to Paris to congratulate the king, 
had a medal struck in memory of the happy event, and a 
picture of the massacre, painted and hung in the Vatican. 
A scroll at the top contained a Latin inscription to the 
effect, The Pontiff approves the murder of Coligny. 

Tremendous as this blow had been, it did not crush Pro- 
testantism in France ; a twelfth part of the entire population of 
the country were still attached to the Reformed religion. 
Henry IV., on ascending the throne, issued, in 1598, the Edict 
of Nantes, which placed Protestants on an equal footing with 
Catholics in regard to civil rights, and the free exercise of their 
religion. The Huguenots soon began to recover from the 
effects of past persecutions ; but the gleam of prosperity was 
of short duration. With the murder of Henry IV. it passed 
away, and by the loss of La Rochelle the political power of 
the Protestants was extinguished. Oppression and injustice 
gradually increased, till, on the accession of Louis XIV., they 
were so galling, that eight hundred thousand of the best 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 211 

Huguenot families of France, emigrated to England and 
other countries, to find the liberty to worship God denied 
them in their own. At last, in 1685, the Edict of Nantes, and 
all the other concessions made to the Reformed, were revoked 
completely; their churches were demolished; their meetings 
prohibited ; their schools closed ; their children, from five to 
sixteen, taken from them to be educated as Catholics ; while at 
the same time they were forbidden to emigrate. A reward of 
five thousand five hundred livres was offered, for information 
leading to the capture of any one of the Huguenot preachers. 
Persecution waxed hotter and hotter; secret meetings, sur- 
prised by the dragoons, were at once turned into scenes of 
butchery and slaughter. Incredible tortures were invented, 
and cruelties, the recital of which is almost impossible, were 
perpetrated by the Romish party, on their unoffending fellow- 
subjects. The Protestants, driven to desperation, rose at last 
in the Cevennes, and in 1702; the war of the " Camisards " 
began. A Huguenot historian of this dreadful civil war, says, 
" Never did hell in the direst persecution, invent or employ 
means so diabolical and inhuman as the dragoons, and the 
monks who head them, have used to destroy us. These 
cruelties were general in France, but most violent in our 
Cevennes." The Pope, Clement XL, did all in his power to 
secure the utter extinction of the persecuted Camisards. He 
promised complete exemption from the pains of purgatory, to 
all who took up arms to exterminate " the accursed and exe- 
crable race." For three years this cruel crusade continued, till 
the fair and fruitful hills and valleys of the Cevennes, were 
turned into desolation, and the Protestants completely crushed. 
Time and space fail to tell the sickening and similar stories 
of the papal persecutions in Spain and Portugal, in Savoy, in 
Poland, in Bohemia, and in the Thirty Years' War in Germany ; 
the horrible persecutions of the Emperor Charles V., and 
above all of the dark deeds of the Papacy, wrought through the 
infamous Duke of Alva, in the Low Countries. Let the thrill- 
ingly interesting story of the holy heroism of hundreds and 



212 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

thousands of Christian martyrs, as told in Motley's " Dutch 
Republic/' add its testimony to the fact, that the Papal power 
has fulfilled the inspired prediction, " he shall wear out the saints 
of the Most High," and " make war with the saints and over- 
come them -" let Foxe's " Book of Martyrs " do the same ; let the 
records of the Lollard persecution in our own land, and of the 
reign of " bloody " Mary, do the same ; let Mexico, and Abys- 
sinia, and India, tell their tales of the Holy Inquisition and 
its doings, and of the Jesuits and their proceedings ; and let 
Italy itself unveil the scenes that Ferrara, and Venice, and 
Parma, and Calabria have witnessed, in confirmation of the 
fact. In the mouth of many many witnesses, the charge is 
proved, and one single statement makes all argument on the 
subject needless. It has been calculated that the Popes of Rome 
have, directly or indirectly, slain on account of their faith, fifty 
millions of martyrs ; fifty millions of men and women who re- 
fused to be parties to Romish idolatries, who held to the Bible 
as the Word of God, and who loved not their lives unto death, 
but resisted unto blood, striving against sin. 

VI. Dominion. 

One of the most marked features of the great power of evil 
predicted in the four prophecies we are considering, is, its wide 
dominion. 

Of this revived head of the Roman earth we read, (Rev. 
xiii. 7,) "power was given him, over all kindreds, and tongues, 
and nations " ; and other clauses in the chapter show that so 
absolute was this power to be, that all, small and great, rich 
and poor, free and bond, were to be brought into subjection to 
it, and that it would become almost impossible, for those who 
refused such subjection, to exist ; they would not even be per- 
mitted to buy or sell. 

A peculiar mark of the nature of this power is also 
given. The subjection yielded to it would be a voluntary 
one. It is said of the ten horns, that they shall "have 
one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 213 

Beast " ; that is, it is predicted that the kingdoms into which 
the Roman earth would be divided, on the fall of the Empire, 
would voluntarily place themselves, in some sense, under the 
dominion of this final form of Roman power. Their subjection 
would not be effected by conquest, but by the arts of persua- 
sion and subtle influence. They would be deceived and 
cajoled into submission, by fair words, by false miracles, by 
lying wonders, by superstitious fears, and by the influence of 
others, acting on behalf of this power, rather than by its own 
direct efforts. 

This feature is so peculiar, so unlike the analogous features 
of the three first Beasts or Empires of Daniel, whose dominion 
was acquired by devouring, pushing, running furiously, smit- 
ing, breaking, stamping in pieces, in a word, by exercising 
physical force, instead of subtle spiritual influence, that it serves 
at once to indicate the power intended. The Papacy is the 
only great political power, which has ever held sway over all 
kindreds, tongues, and nations, without having to fight for it, 
and with the consent of the subjected kingdoms. The pro- 
found ignorance of the dark ages, so zealously fostered by the 
Papacy, created a degree of superstition, which rendered kings 
and peoples alike, willingly obedient to this power, which boldly 
claimed to be supernatural, and to exercise dominion in heaven 
and in hell, as well as on earth, and over the souls, as well as 
over the bodies of men ; and that both for time and for eternity. 

The prophecy further distinctly intimates, that this power 
will not be universal or all-inclusive, even in the lands where 
it should prevail. It would be resisted by a certain class : 
" all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose 
names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain 
from the foundation of the world." This foretells that the 
godly — " the saints " — the chosen and called and faithful, and 
they alone, will refuse to bow to this power ; and the vision 
shows also, that they will do it at the risk, and too often at 
the cost of the loss of, life itself. How literally and fearfully 
this prediction has been fulfilled in the history of the Pa- 



214 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

pacy, the preceding outline of the persecutions inflicted on 
so-called " heretics/' shows. 

The extent and the character of Papal dominion, during the 
dark ages, is, in our days, little realized. It is not easy, gazing 
on the rotten stump of an old oak, to picture to one's self what 
the tree was in the days of its glorious youth, and of its mighty 
maturity ; how its immense branches shot out on every side, 
overshadowing a thousand lower growths ; how the tempests 
attacked it in vain, and the hurricanes only rooted it more 
firmly in the soil. How beautiful it looked in its light green 
robe in spring ; how magnificent in its ruddy autumnal brown - } 
how generation after generation of birds sheltered amid its 
branches, and of wild boars fed upon its acorns. The cen- 
turies that have rolled over the tree have left little trace of what 
it was, and yet the very size of the stump tells the tale of its 
bygone might and glory. It is just so with the power of the 
Roman Pontiffs. The world can smile now at the puerility of the 
proud and preposterous pretensions, of the poor old man who 
occupies the chair of St. Peter, in his Vatican prison in Rome. 
It listens to his loud claim to infallibility with a laugh of con- 
tempt, and to his fierce anathemas on science, and literature, 
and social and religious liberty, with the calm and compassion- 
ate scorn, with which the wanderings of a lunatic are regarded. 
But of yore it was quite another thing. Every utterance of the 
tiara-crowned monarch was heard with awe, every command 
was implicitly obeyed. Men trembled under his curse, and 
gloried in his benediction, as if they had been those of Deity. 
The thunders of his interdicts shook the nations, and the fires 
of his excommunications spread death and destruction abroad. 
The imperial edicts of the Emperors Justinian and Phocas 
gave the Popes of Rome a legal power in all religious matters ; 
and very early the various Gothic princes of Western Christen- 
dom showed a disposition to yield submission to the Roman Pon- 
tiff, as children to a father, or inferiors to a superior. Already, 
in the eighth century, Gregory II. boasted to the Greek Em- 
peror, " all the kings of the west reverence the Pope as a God 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 215 

on earth" and facts fully justified the assertion. Pepin, for 
example, when aspiring to the crown of France, prayed the Pope 
to authorize his usurpation j and as soon as he had done so, the 
Franks, and indeed the whole Western World, recognised his 
title. Even the great Emperor Charlemagne, was willing to 
receive from the Roman Pontiff his crown and dominion. 
" The Lord John, apostolic and universal Pope," says the 
Council of Pavia, "hath at Rome elected, and anointed with 
the holy oil, Charlemagne, as Emperor." The western kings of 
Europe accepted the position of subserviency to the Sovereign 
Pontiff, by admitting into their coronation oaths a promise, 
" to be faithful and submissive to the Popes, and the Roman 
Church." 

In its earlier days the Papacy, restrained by princes from exer- 
cising civil dominion, was equally restrained by the indepen- 
dence of bishops, and the authority of councils, from assuming 
despotic power, even in the church. " From the time of Leo 
IX.," says Mosheim, " the Popes employed every method which 
the most artful ambition could suggest, to remove these limits, 
and to render their dominion both despotic and universal." 
Hildebrand, one of the most ambitious, sagacious, crafty, and 
arrogant of men, when he became Pope under the title of 
Gregory VII., " looked up to the summit of universal empire, 
with a wistful eye, and laboured up the ascent with uninter- 
rupted ardour and invincible perseverance." He laboured in- 
defatigably to render the universal church, subject to the des- 
potic government of the Pontiff alone, as well as to submit 
to his jurisdiction the emperors, kings, and princes of the 
earth, and to render their dominion tributary to the see of 
Rome. Even when the Pope reclaimed a crown he had con- 
ferred, he was often met with the most abject submission. 
The Emperors Rodolphus and Otho, of Germany, not only 
received the crown as a Papal grant, on the Pope's depo- 
sition of previous emperors, but they resigned, at his bidding, 
the crowns so received. Peter II. of Arragon, and John, king 
of England, and other monarchs also, gave up their indepen- 



216 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED, 

dence, that they might receive back their realms as vassals of 
the Pope. " Under the sacerdotal monarchy of St. Peter," says 
Gibbon, " the nations began to resume the practice of seeking 
on the banks of the Tiber, their kings, their laws, and the 
oracles of their fate." And similarly, in speaking of the first 
Norman king of Sicily, he says, " The nine kings of the Latin 
world might disclaim their new associate, unless he were 
consecrated by the authority of the supreme Pontiff." 

If kings and emperors bowed thus before the Pope, it will 
easily be believed that the reverence of the common people for 
his person and office, and their submission to his arrogant and 
blasphemous pretensions, was complete. " Not in respect of 
his power in secular things, but in things much higher, who 
knows not of the universal reverence and faith in his blas- 
phemous pretensions exhibited throughout the long middle 
ages by Christendom ? Look at the thronging multitudes on 
pilgrimage to Rome, in assurance of the salvation he promises 
them ! Look at their reception of his dogmas in matters of 
faith, as very oracles from heaven ! Look at their purchasing 
of his indulgences with their often hard earned money, in the 
belief of delivering thereby the captive souls of departed rela- 
tives, as well as their own souls, from the pains of purgatory 
and of hell ! " * Look at the way in which thousands of all 
classes engaged in crusades and religious wars at the bidding 
of the Popes, and refused aid, even to their nearest and dearest 
friends, if they came under his ban ! From the most private 
domestic relations of individuals, to the most public national 
acts of empires, all fell under the rule, direct or indirect, of the 
Papacy. It was the last solemn united act, before the Reforma- 
tion, of the deputies of Christendom assembled in council, to 
subscribe the bull Unam Sanctum, which declares that as there 

IS BUT ONE BODY OF THE CHURCH AND CHRISTENDOM, SO THERE 
IS BUT ONE HEAD, THE VlCAR OF CHRIST — THE POPE j AND 
THAT IT IS ESSENTIAL TO THE SALVATION OF EVERY HUMAN 

* Elliott, vol. iii., p. 171. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. ill 



being, to be subject to the Roman Pontiff ; and no sub- 
sequent Council ever revoked this decree. 

It is clear, then, that a widespread and all-pervading power, 
of the most despotic, absolute, and blasphemous character, 
was wielded for a thousand years by the Popes of Rome, 
and is claimed by them still; that this power was sub- 
mitted to by all the nations of Western Christendom for 
many centuries; and that it is still acknowledged by all 
Roman Catholics everywhere. The late Pope, in ad- 
dressing the people of Rome on one occasion, congratu- 
lated them, that they had more than two hundred millions of 
fellow subjects elsewhere, speaking all languages, and dwelling 
in all nations. 

In the Papacy, has therefore been fulfilled to the letter, and 
in the most marvellous way, the prediction, " Power was given 
unto him over all kindreds and tongues and nations." * 

The growth of this power to these gigantic proportions, was 
a most singular phenomenon. Tyndale the Reformer speak- 
ing of it, says : " To see how the holy father came up, mark 
the ensample of the ivy ! First it springeth up out of the 
earth, and then awhile creepeth along by the ground, till it 

* The application of this prophecy to the Popedom has sometimes been 
doubted, because of the wide universality of this expression. But com- 
parison with other scriptures removes this difficulty. We read in Matthew 
iii. 5 : " Then went out unto him Jerusalem and all Judea, and all the 
region round about Jordan, and were baptized." And again, Acts ix. 35, 
"And all that dwelt in Lydda and Saron saw him, and turned to the Lord." 
1 ' All " in these passages must be taken with limitations, which are not ex- 
pressed. So in Daniel iii. 7, it is said that when Nebuchadnezzar set up 
his image, "all the people, the nations, and the languages fell down and 
worshipped." Now, the second verse of the chapter shows, that only the 
princes and governors of those nations were present ; they are regarded as 
representatives of their people. In the same way all Christendom submitted 
to the Popes of Rome, through the Councils which represented them. The 
exception in the text of those whose names are written in the Lamb's book 
of life shows that — just as all were not Israel that were of Israel — so all 
were not Papists that were subject to the Papacy. This must never be for- 
gotten. At the last the cry goes forth, " Come out of her, my people" a 
call which implies that — as Lot dwelt in Sodom — so some true believers will 
be found in the Roman Catholic system, even just prior to its final destruc- 
tion. 



2i 8 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

find a great tree. Then it joineth itself beneath, unto the 
body of the tree, and creepeth up a little and a little, fair and 
softly. At the beginning, while it is yet thin and small, the 
burden is not perceived ; it seemeth glorious to garnish the 
tree in winter. But it holdeth fast withal, and ceaseth not 
to climb up till it be at the top, and even above all. And then 
it sendeth its branches along by the branches of the tree, and 
overgroweth all, and waxeth great, heavy, and thick ; and it 
sucketh the moisture so sore out of the tree and his branches, 
that it choaketh and stifleth them. And then the foul, stink- 
ing ivy waxeth mighty in the stump of the tree, and becometh 
a seat and a nest for all unclean birds and for blind owls 
which hawk in the dark, and dare not come to the light. 

" Even so the Bishop of Rome, now called Pope, at the begin- 
ning crope along upon the earth, and every man trod on him. 
As soon as there came a Christian emperor, he joined himself 
to his feet and kissed them, and crope up a little, with begging 
now this privilege, now that. . . . And thus with flatter- 
ing and feigning and vain superstition, under the name of 
St. Peter, he crept up, and fastened his roots in the heart of 
the emperor, and with his sword climbed up above all his 
fellow bishops, and brought them under his feet. And as he 
subdued them by the emperor's sword, even so after they were 
sworn faithful, he, by their means, climbed up above the 
emperor, and subdued him also, and made him stoop unto his 
feet and kiss them ! . . . And thus the Pope, the father 
of all hypocrites, hath with falsehood and guile perverted 
the order of the world, and turned things upside down." 

VII. Before closing this chapter, we must notice the doom of 
the great power of evil predicted in the fourfold prophecy we 
are considering. 

It consists of two parts, gradual consumption, followed by 
sudden and final destruction. The latter, being still future, 
affords no opportunity of comparing the prophetic announce- 
ment with the historical fulfilment; but the former, being 
already partially fulfilled, and still in progress of fulfilment; 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 219 

does, and the correspondence between prediction and event 
is nowhere more clear and unmistakable. 

In Daniel, in Thessalonians, and in the Apocalypse, the final 
destruction of this last form of the Roman power, is connected 
with the personal appearing of Christ to establish his millennial 
kingdom. But in each prophecy it is also intimated that a 
consuming and destroying process, would go on for some time, 
previously to the end, so that the once mighty power would be 
weakened and impoverished, before it is finally destroyed. 

" They shall take away his dominion, to consume and destroy 
it unto the end " (Dan. vii. 26). " Whom the Lord shall con- 
sume with the Spirit of his mouth, and destroy with the bright- 
ness of his coming " (2 Thess. ii. 8). " The ten horns shall 
hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and 
shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire " (Rev. xvii. 16). 

The final destruction of the power in question is described 
in Rev. xix. 20, "The beast was taken and cast alive into a 
lake of fire burning with brimstone." This is his destruction 
with the brightness of Christ's coming ; and the consumption by 
the spirit of his mouth, must have preceded this final judgment. 

Pharaoh and the hosts of Egypt were similarly wasted and 
consumed by the ten plagues, before they were whelmed in 
the waters of the Red Sea. The consuming process is figured 
in the Apocalypse as taking place under the outpouring of 
certain vials of wrath, on the kingdom of the Beast, and on his 
followers. 

We inquire, then, whether there have been in the history of 
the Papacy any events answering to this emblem, whether any 
process of consicmption is distinctly traceable, any wasting to 
decay of its resources, any conspicuous diminution of its do- 
minion, and reduction of its influence and authority. 

The facts of the case are so notorious, that it is needless to 
set them forth in detail. The political power of the Roman 
Pontiffs, once, as we have seen, a dread reality in Europe, is 
gone. It is a memory of the past, not an existing fact. The 
territorial possessions of the Pope are gone ; the States of the 



220 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

Church form part of the dominions of the king of Italy, and 
Rome itself has become his capital. Within the last twenty 
years all the Concordats made between the Pope and the 
various countries of Europe, have been brought to an end. 
The immense landed property, belonging to the various orders 
of monks and nuns on whom the Papacy relied as its universal 
agents, has all been confiscated and secularized in Italy, in 
France, in England, and in other lands. In 15 13, when the 
great Lateran Council was held, there was not a " heretic " to 
be found. There are now nearly eighty millions of Pro- 
testants, who abjure Papal doctrines and practices. The 
dominion of the Popes, over the bodies and minds of men, 
is therefore marvellously diminished, though the latter is not 
yet destroyed. 

And it is specially worthy of note that the means by which 
this conspicuous and undeniable " consumption " of Papal 
power has been accomplished, are precisely the means speci- 
fied by the Apostle Paul in Thessalonians. He says that the 
Lord shall consume this evil power by the spirit of his mouth, 
i.e., by his word. 

Holy Scripture is of course the form in which the word or 
spirit of the Lord's mouth, retains a sensible existence, and 
influences human society. " The words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit, and they are life." 

Does not the extreme jealousy with which the Papacy has 
always endeavoured to bury the Bible in an unknown tongue, 
or to undo its teachings by false interpretations, betray its 
inveterate antagonism to the power destined to "consume" it? 
" There is an instinct of apprehension, a consciousness, which, 
antecedent to experience, divines danger ; it seems discernible 
in the alarm with which Romanism recoils from Holy Scrip- 
ture." * 

The Creed of Pius IV. — that creed, a belief in which is, ac- 
cording to Papal declaration, essential to salvation — expressly 

* ''The Apostasy " : O'Sullivan. 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 221 

states that the Bible is not for the people : " Whosoever will 
be saved," must renounce it. It is a forbidden book. Bible 
Societies are " Satanic contrivances." Bible burnings are most 
Catholic demonstrations. All this dread of Scripture, all this 
violent opposition to its circulation, is a plain proof that the 
Papacy recognises in the Word of God its worst antagonist. 
Experience shows it is right. 

Wherever the Word of God has free course, the power of 
the Papacy is at an end. The Reformation sprang from a 
recovered Bible ; and wherever, as in Scotland, the popular 
mind is imbued with Scripture, Romanism has no chance. It 
is the absence of Bible knowledge that enables the Papacy to 
retain its sway, in Spain and other European countries, in 
Mexico, in Brazil, and in parts of Ireland. 

The fact was stated in evidence before the Commissioners 
of Education, that in 1846, among 400 students attending 
Maynooth College, only ten had Bibles or Testaments, while 
every student was required to provide himself with a copy of 
the works of the Jesuits, Bailly and Delahogue. 

The failure of the Hibernian Schools, in which the Bible 
without note or comment was used, was attributed by Lord 
Stanley to that fact alone : the priests exerted " themselves, 
with energy and success, against a system to which they were 
in principle opposed." The parents were told that it was 
" mortal sin " to send their children to such schools ; and if 
they persisted, the sacrament was withheld from them, even 
when dying. 

Pius IX., in his Encyclical Letter of 1850, speaks of Bible 
study as " poisonous reading," and urges all his venerable 
brethren with vigilance and solicitude to put a stop to it. 
A clergyman lost his wife in Rome, and wished to put a text 
on her tombstone. The Pope refused permission, not only on 
the ground that it was unlawful to express a hope of immor- 
tality as to a " heretic," but because it was " contrary to law, 
to publish in the sight of the Roman people any portion of the 
Word of God " ! 



222 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

"Rome is constrained to do homage to the majesty of the 
Bible ; she has done her best to exile that book from the world, 
with all the treasures it contains, — its thrilling narratives, its 
rich poetry, its profound philosophy, its sublime doctrines, 
its blessed promises, its magnificent prophecies, its glorious 
and immortal hopes. Were any being so cruel as to ex- 
tinguish the light of day, and condemn the successive genera- 
tions of men to pass their lives amid the gloom ol an unbroken 
night, where would words be found strong enough to execrate 
the enormity ? Far greater is the crime of Rome. After the 
day of Christianity had dawned, she was able to cover Europe 
with darkness ; and by the exclusion of the Bible, to per- 
petuate that darkness from age to age. The enormity of this 
wickedness cannot be known on earth. But she cannot con- 
ceal from herself that, despite her anathemas, her indices 
expurgatorii, her tyrannical edicts, by which she still attempts 
to wall round her territory of darkness, the Bible is destined 
to overcome in the conflict. Hence her implacable hostility — 
hostility founded to a large extent on fear. ... To 
Popery a single Bible is more dreadful than an army ten 
thousand strong. . . . When she meets the Bible in 
her path, she is startled, and exclaims with terror, I know 
thee who thou art ! Art thou come to torment me before the 
time?"* 

For the last three hundred years, ever since the Reforma- 
tion, the Papacy has been in process of consumption by the 
spirit of the Lord's mouth. It will ere long be " destroyed 
by the brightness of his coming." 

VIII. This leads us to the last point we must notice in our 
brief examination of this remarkable fourfold prophecy of the 
Papacy, — Its duration. 

The period of the dominion of the little horn, is fixed in 
Daniel vii. as " time, times, and the dividing of time ; " and 
that of the last head of the Roman beast (which is, as we 

* Wylie's ' : Papacy.' - 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 223 

have seen, only another symbol of the same power), as " forty 
and two months," the same period under a different designa- 
tion. This period is identical, and synchronous with, the 
1260 days of parallel prophecies. Interpreted according to 
the year-day system, it has had a most evident fulfilment in 
the duration of the power of the Papacy ; and it is besides a 

KEY TO THE WHOLE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, NATURAL 
AND REVEALED. 

The entire system thus opened up, is a confirmation of the 
interpretation which opens it : its universal range, its exquisite 
internal harmonies, and its deep underlying connection with 
the profoundest truths of our faith, make this system a grand 
witness to the true interpretation of the mystic phrases which 
furnish the clue for its discovery. 

To enter more largely on this point here would be to antici- 
pate subsequent chapters. For the present we must content 
ourselves with asserting simply that the predicted period of the 
great power of evil we have been considering, 1260 years, 
points out the Papacy as the proper fulfilment, as clearly as 
any of the other features. The Bishops of Rome assumed 
universal supremacy in the beginning of the seventh century, 
and have exercised it ever since. It is a solemn fact, that 
these inspired prophecies,— every other prediction in which 
has been so marvellously fulfilled, — foretell that it will not last 
much longer. Its days are numbered. Its end is near. 

To conclude. The origin of the Papacy corresponded with 
every indication furnished by these four prophecies. Its cha- 
racter answers exactly to the singularly wicked and evil charac- 
ter assigned by the inspiring Spirit to the predicted power. 
Self-exalting utterances, great words, against God and man, 
have been one of its most distinguishing features ; idolatries and 
false doctrines have been inculcated and promulgated through- 
out Christendom by its instrumentality \ it has made war with 
the saints and overcome them, fifty millions of evangelical 
martyrs having been slain by its authority ; it has ruled over all 
the kindreds and nations of Catholic Christendom, and that 



224 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

for more than twelve centuries ; and it has for the last three 
hundred years been wasting to decay, undermined and ex- 
posed by the Reformation movement, which itself was the 
direct result of the revival of scriptural teachings and the 
dissemination of Bible truth. The Papacy was never so low, 
in power, in resources, in prestige, as it is at this moment. 
According to the Divine programme afforded by these sacred, 
once mysterious but now clear predictions, the Papal drama 
is played out. The final scene alone remains, — the destruction 
of the Papacy by the brightness of Christ's coming. 

In the face of such a fulfilment as this, — a fulfilment on so 
grand a scale, as to the area involved, the events comprised, 
and the time occupied, — a fulfilment affecting countless my- 
riads of human beings during its course of more than twelve 
hundred years, — a fulfilment of immense spiritual importance, 
to thirty or forty generations of professing Christians, throughout 
the world, — a fulfilment so little to have been expected, and 
therefore so peculiarly worthy of being made the subject of 
prophetic forewarning, — ki the face of such a fulfilment, surely 
candour would admit, this is that which was spoken by the 
prophet ; this is that system of supernatural and soul-destroy- 
ing error, that dire and dreadful apostasy, revealed by the 
inspiring Spirit, as the principal power of evil, to arise between 
the first and second advents of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

When the four symbolic beasts were presented to Daniel, 
it was the fourth that arrested his gaze, and it was the " little 
horn " of that fourth empire, that mainly attracted his attention, 
and the angelic interpreter dwells with tenfold fulness on the 
power represented by this symbol. So when Paul predicted 
the future of the church on earth, it was the rise, domination 
and decay of this same evil power that he presented, as the 
main event to intervene before her rapture to meet the Lord 
in the air ; and so when John received the revelation of Jesus 
Christ, which God gave to him, the central symbol of the 
entire group of hieroglyphs, the one which occupied the most 
prominent place in the prophecy, was one of this same power, 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 225 

"the beast," the great antagonist of the Lamb and his fol- 
lowers. 

How worthy of such conspicuous mention in the sacred 
oracles, of such solemn denunciation by the Holy Ghost, — how 
worthy of such pre-eminent fame (or rather infamy !) among 
the gigantic evils that have afflicted mankind, — how deserving 
of every dark designation bestowed, and of the dread doom 
denounced, has the Papacy proved itself to be. The self- 
styled vicar of Christ has been his worst enemy in the world, 
the crowned priest on the papal throne has been the undoing 
of the church on earth. The system which asserts salvation 
impossible beyond its borders, has destroyed the spiritual and 
temporal well-being of untold multitudes of men. Unutterably 
disastrous as have been it's direct effects, its millions of 
slaughtered saints, its myriads of deluded disciples, its indirect 
effects have been hardly less terrible. By its priestly assump- 
tions and pious frauds, by its notorious cupidity and mercenary 
practices, by its gross perversions of the truth, and unblushing 
corruptions of morality; by its reason-revolting dogmas, childish 
superstitions, and endless old wives' fables, by its uniform 
opposition to social progress, and its habitual alliance with 
political tyranny, it has brought all religion into contempt, and 
filled Catholic Christendom with scorners, infidels, and atheists. 

As to every single particular noted in the sure word of 
prophecy, the plainest correspondence can be traced between 
the fourfold prediction and the Papal fulfilment ; and we can- 
not refrain from deprecating most earnestly, the mischievous 
system of interpretation, which teaches that this clear, undeni- 
able, and grandly terrible accomplishment, is not the fulfilment 
inte?ided. 

Standing face to face with Jesus Christ, the disciples of John 
inquired in their master's name, "Art Thou He that should 
come, or look we for another ? " They were answered by 
deeds, not words. The Lord wrought Messianic miracles in 
their presence, and said, " Go and tell John what thing ye 
have seen and heard ; " that is, He did the deeds which it had 

Q 



226 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

been predicted that the Messiah would do, and all were responsible 
to draw thence the inference that He was the Messiah. So, 
pointing to the church history of the last twelve centuries, we 
say, lo ! the Papacy has done the deeds which were to be done 
by the oft-predicted power of evil, foretold in the word of 
God ! And we believe that Christians are responsible to draw 
from the historical fact, the inference, the Papacy is the power 
that was thus predicted. 

To neglect the evidence which proves this fact, almost to 
demonstration, and to speculate about possible future literal 
fulfilments, as the intended and main accomplishment, of these 
sacred symbolic prophecies, is to denude them of their sancti- 
fying power, and to turn their keen edge of practical appli- 
cation. If the Papacy is the real fulfilment, if it is the evil that 
was foreseen as of supreme importance (as it has certainly 
proved to be), it is surely no light matter for teachers of the 
word to mislead others on the point. To do so, is to relieve 
Popery of the fearful stigma cast on it by the spirit of prophecy, 
to deprive the church of the Divine estimate of this Anti- 
christian system, and to substitute instead, wild and unau- 
thorized speculations, about some coming man, who is, in three 
years and a half, to exhaust these divinely given predictions, 
which the church has for eighteen centuries been studying. 

We entreat our Futurist friends to consider, whether it is more 
likely that the all-wise God indited these solemn predictions for 
the benefit of many generations of his saints, or exclusively for 
the guidance of the last generation of this age ? Did He pass 
by unnoticed, th^ gigantic and universally influential power, 
which ruled the whole of Christendom with despotic sway and 
inconceivably evil results for more than a thousand years, in 
order to describe in detail, and many times over, the doings of 
one man, the brief career of a single individual, who has not 
yet appeared? Was it to warn the church of the nineteenth 
century against some short-lived Napoleon, that the Holy 
Ghost unveiled the future to the prophet Daniel, and that the 
Lord Jesus gave the Apocalypse to the saintly John? 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 227 

The ample and repeated descriptions of this power of evil, the 
unparalleled denunciations against it, the solemn adjurations to 
the people of God, to avoid any connection with it, all forbid 
the idea. Not for one, but for fifty generations of saints, were 
these prophecies indited ; not to be fulfilled on the petty scale 
of three years, but on the majestic one of twelve centuries; not 
to indicate gross material dangers, but subtle spiritual and 
ecclesiastical evils, of long duration, and world-wide prevalence. 
The coming of Antichrist is no brief future event, lying be- 
tween us and our blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our 
Saviour ; he was revealed more than a thousand years ago, he 
has run his course, and lasted his pre-appointed period ; for 
three hundred years, he has been consuming by the spirit of 
Christ's mouth, and of all the momentous series of events con- 
nected with his long-predicted career, nothing remains to be 
fulfilled save his final conflict with the Lamb, and destruction 
with the brightness of Christ's coming. 

To conclude. The cop-ect interpretation of the prophecy of 
Babylon the grea^—that it is the Church of Rome — confirms the 
above view of this prophecy of " the beast" and is indeed the key 
to the whole Apocalypse. 

There is a vast difference between the Papacy, and the 
corrupt church, which it founded, governed, and used as its 
tool ; a difference, less in degree, but similar in character, to 
that existing between the Head of the true church, and that 
church which He founded, governs, and employs as an instru- 
ment to accomplish his will in the world. Many things are true 
of the Lord Jesus, that are not true of the church which is his 
body, close and inseparable as is the connection between them. 
So, many things are true of the Popes of Rome which are not 
true of the Roman Catholic Church, close as is the connection 
between them. Widely dissimilar hieroglyphs are selected to 
prefigure the two, in the Apocalypse, and yet the connection 
between them is very clearly indicated ; they are never con- 
founded, yet never disjoined. 

Now the duration of the corrupt church is not mentioned 



228 FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 

in this prophecy, though long duration is implied ; but her 
name is given, and it demonstrates with all but mathematical 
certainty, as we have seen, that the church intended is the 
Church of Rome. That church has, we know, as a matter of 
history, already lasted in a condition of corruption and apostasy, 
for more than twelve centuries. Its fall is in the Apocalypse 
represented as taking place under the seventh vial (Rev. xvi.), 
and as synchronizing with the marriage of the Lamb (Rev. 
xix. 1-4). 

The power of " the beast " (or Papal dynasty) is also repre- 
sented as being consumed under the outpouring of the vials, 
while he himself and his armies are destroyed by the advent, 
which synchronizes with the marriage of the Lamb. That is, 
" Babylon " and " the beast n are represented as coming to an 
end at one and the same time. 

Their careers are also cotemporaneous, for the woman is repre- 
sented as seated on the Roman beast — "the beast that was 
and is not " — that is, not old Pagan Rome, but Rome revived, 
in a totally new form of domination. This beast " that was 
and is not" is expressly said to be the eighth (v. 11), that is the 
last terrible form of revived Roman power, so fully described 
in chapter xiii. — the power of which we have been treating. 

It follows, that since the Church of Rome has already lasted 
more than twelve centuries, the last ruling head of the Roman 
world, the blasphemous, persecuting, self-exalting head or power 
here predicted, must have been in existence for the very same 
period, which is indeed the duration assigned to it, in symbolic 
language by the prophecy — 1260 years. 

Now what power has actually ruled the nations of Christen- 
dom from Rome as its seat, during the last twelve centuries ? 
There can be but one reply — The Papacy : It must 
therefore be the power prefigured by the symbol of 
"the beast." 

Further, the vials, under which Babylon and " the beast " are 
represented as being brought to an end, synchronize with the 
close of the period of the trumpets. The events prefigured 



FORETOLD AND FULFILLED. 229 

under the earlier trumpets must therefore be sought in the 
previous history of Christendom ; i.e., in the time of the undi- 
minished power of the Papacy, and in the events which pre- 
ceded and accompanied its rise. 

The martyrs represented in the fifteenth chapter of the 
book, standing as victors on the sea of glass, having " gotten the 
victory over the beast, and over his image, and over the number 
of his name," must be those slain by Papal Rome. A previous 
group of martyrs are represented in the sixth chapter, who 
must therefore be those slain by Pagan Rome in the ten great 
persecutions of the church by the Caesars. 

Now it is under the fifth seal that this earlier company is seen 
under the altar, and consequently the events figured as taking 
place under the four previous seals, must be sought in days 
prior to the last great persecution under Diocletian, that is, in the 
first three hundred years of church history. 

Thus we are led by clear and simple synchronisms, afforded 
by the book itself, to a conclusion respecting the Apocalypse, 
similar to that which we reached by other lines of argument ; 
namely, that its fulfilment is to be sought in the events of the 
Christian era, and that so far from all its visions, from chap, 
vi. to chap. xix. being still wholly future, they are almost 
wholly past. Nor can the force of this argument be avoided, 
save by denying that the Babylon of the Apocalypse represents 
the Church of Rome. 

In the remaining portion of this work we shall find all the 
conclusions we have reached in its three earlier parts, respecting 
the second advent and the millennium, the resurrection and the 
judgment to come, the true scope and nature of the Apocalypse, 
and the signification of these, its two leading prefigurations, 
— abundantly confirmed from independent sources, and by 
arguments drawn from the realms of natural science. 

End of Part III. 



PART IV. 

INQUIR Y INTO THE DIVINE SYSTEM 01 TIMES 
AND SEASONS NATURAL AND REVEALED. 



SECTION I. 
Solar and Lunar Dominion Causal and Chronological. 

CHAPTER I. 

chronology, biblical and natural, is there harmony 
between the two? 

solar and lunar dominion in the inorganic world. 

soli-lunar control of terrestrial revolutions. 

winds.— rains.-^-ocean currents. — tides. — electric and 
magnetic variations. 

OUR subject in this volume so far, has been sacred pro- 
phecy. We have observed the manner in which the 
Omniscient God has been pleased to reveal the future to man 
— progressively ; we have investigated some of the main prin- 
ciples, on which the symbolic predictions of Scripture should 
be interpreted ; and we have traced the historic fulfilment of 
two of the most important of them. We must now turn to 
the distinct yet cognate subject of chronology, and examine 
the times and seasons of some of the events foretold in pro- 
phecy, and those of Scripture in general. 

Every Bible student is aware, that prophecy has its chron- 
ology, that various periods are assigned to events forefold 
by holy men of old, who spake as they were moved by the 
Holy Ghost. Empires have their duration, dynasties and 
kingdoms, last for certain periods, and as predicting these, 



DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 231 

prophecy can no more be divested of the chronological ele- 
ment than history. Indeed prophecy being simply history 
anticipated, the times and seasons of the one, become in due 
course, those of the other ; they are two parts of one whole ; 
and now that history unrolls before our eyes a record extend- 
ing over six thousand years, very few are the prophetic periods 
whose fulfilment cannot be traced in some part of the scroll. 

But further; there exists, not in sacred prophecy alone, 
but throughout the entire Bible, a system of times and seasons. 
Chronology is a prominent feature of the Holy Scriptures. In 
the account of the creation, in the narrative of the flood, 
in the biographies of the patriarchs, in the Mosaic economy 
with its legal and ceremonial enactments, in the history of the 
Jewish nation ; in the prophets ; in the gospels, and in the 
Apocalypse ; statements of time abound. Not only is the 
creation work recorded, but the time it occupied ; not only are 
the waters of the flood described, but we are told how many 
days they took to rise, and how many to fall ; how many years 
Noah had lived prior to the crisis, how many days he waited 
before he sent out the dove, and how many more before 
he went forth from the ark, himself. It is so throughout. 
In fact the science of true chronology is based upon the state- 
ments of Scripture : the first of chronologers, Clinton, accepts 
its data as correct, and draws from thence his conclusions as 
to the age of the world. Unlike the sacred books of all false 
religions, Bible stories are no vague myths, or fabled occur- 
rences, referred to some remote intangible past. The time 
of the events recorded is accurately measured, and they are 
all fitted into a framework of true chronology. And while 
the times and seasons of Scripture are substantial historical 
periods, bearing the stamp of accuracy and veracity, they form 
part of a series, and belong to a system, the features of which 
it is not difficult to trace. Not only are there chronological 
statements in abundance in the Bible, but there is, under- 
lying them all a system, a peculiar system, harmonious with all 
the other features of that marvellous volume. 



232 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

A moment's reflection will satisfy every well informed person 
that nature has also its times and seasons ; that the outward 
material universe in which we dwell, and the laws which govern 
it, are marked by a well denned periodicity. The entire solar 
system is one great chronometer, the animal and vegetable 
worlds, are regulated by unchangeable laws in respect of time, 
as well as in every other respect ; and nature being, in all its 
grandeur, its beauty, its complexity, its variety, its mystery, a 
revelation of its great Creator's wisdom and power, the system 
of times and seasons which characterizes it, may be called 
a Divine system of times and seasons. 

There is no chance in the length of celestial revolutions, or 
in the duration of cycles of organic change : all is regulated, 
fixed, appointed. " He appointed the moon for seasons, the 
sun knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness and it 
is night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. 
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them 
down in their dens." As to man, " his days are determined, the 
number of his months are with Thee, Thou hast appointed his 
bounds, that he cannot pass." As the apostle Paul proclaimed 
to the Athenians of old, " God hath determined the times before 
appointed " as well as the bounds of the habitation, of all men, 
and of all living things ; and He has fixed the orbit of every 
rolling globe in space, and timed its various revolutions. The 
mighty machine of the universe, has been wound up and 
regulated by its great Creator ; all its myriad parts keep 
march and measure, and move according to the Divine will 
and purpose. 

Now if there be a system of times and seasons, in nature, 
which is unquestionably from God, and a system also in the 
Bible, which claims to be a Divine revelation, it is evidently 
an inquiry of the deepest interest, are these two systems one 2 
T!an any principles or peculiarities be observed, which indicate 
that the two are the offspring of one and the same mind ? Is 
the system of nature, the system of the Bible ? Can the Bible 
system be traced in nature ? Two books are before us, one 



NATURAL AND REVEALED. 



certainly, the other professedly, the work of a given author. 
A. marked peculiarity pervades the latter, with which long study 
has made us familiar. If on examination we find the very 
same singular feature to be prominent in the former, who would 
hesitate to conclude that both were written by one hand ? 

We propose now, in the last part of this work, to investigate 
this interesting and momentous point; to examine into the 
question, whether the natural system of times and seasons, is 
identical with, or related to the Bible system, whether the 
periodicity of nature, and the periodicity of Scripture, are de- 
monstrably two parts of one whole. 

The inquiry, it will be granted is a most legitimate one, for 
both the material universe, and the volume of inspiration are 
open revelations. We are not prying into hidden mysteries, 
or seeking to be wise above what is written. " The secret 
things belong to God, but the things that are revealed, to us 
and to our children : " we are at liberty to study such a 
subject, "whoso is wise and will observe these things" shall 
behold more and more of the glory of God, for the diverse 
revelations which He has made, throw light the one on the 
other. 

Moreover a pleasing element of certainty, attaches to such 
a research : science astronomic, biologic, physical, botanical, 
chemical, optical, — science in all its branches, deals with facts, 
and there is no refusing the testimony of ascertained and well 
established facts. Nature can be watched and tested, and no 
baseless theories stand a chance against her silent testimony. 
Nor can the chronology of secular and sacred history, be made 
to fit a false system. It is too angular, too solid, to adapt it- 
self to a scheme for which it was not designed. The most 
remote pre-historic periods are spaced out for us by Bible 
statements only, but by far the larger part of the annals of the 
human race, are bathed in the double light of sacred and pro- 
fane history. 

The importance of such an investigation will scarcely be 
questioned. In these days of supercilious scientific contempt 



234 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 



for Scripture, we can ill afford to leave unemployed, any single 
line of evidence, which may strengthen the argument for the 
Divine origin of the Bible. To demonstrate this, is to enable 
Christianity to dispense with other evidence, for if Scripture 
be from God, Christianity is unquestionably true. Now if 
Bible times and seasons harmonize with the system by which 
the entire universe is regulated, he will be a most uncandid 
and unscientific sceptic, who refuses to believe that Scripture 
is from God. The harmony once proved, will demand a modi- 
fication of many a theory of unbelief, and to account for it will 
tax the ingenuity of infidels. 

In the following pages it will be our endeavour to show, that 
the natural and Biblical systems are one — two parts of one 
whole, — and may the proof redound to the glory of God, and 
confirm the faith of his servants, in the inspiration of his Holy 
Word. 

We shall examine first the periodicity of nature, inorganic 
and organic, and subsequently that of Scripture history and 
prophecy, gathering from the latter strong confirmation of the 
views of prophetic interpretation already advocated, and con- 
vincing, unmistakable evidence of the nearness of the end of 
the age : and may the Holy Spirit, whose office it is to teach 
us all things, and show us things to come, Himself be our in- 
structor and guide ! 

On the very threshold of this subject, however, we are met 
by a question evidently so fundamental to its clear conception, 
that we must pause to give it a reply : — 

What is Time? 

Time is " duration set forth by measures " * ; the ticking of 
a clock, the beating of a pulse, the burning of a candle, the 
falling of sand through a certain aperture, — these, and a thou- 
sand similar regular movements, may serve as measures, more 
or less exact, of time. 

But its uniform and accurate measurement, being a matter of 

* Locke " On the Human Understanding." 



NATURAL AND REVEALED. 235 

vast and universal importance, and standards of a great variety 
of lengths, being needful to beings who take an interest in the 
past, the present, and the future, including periods the most 
remote ; measures of a far more stable, accurate, regular and 
comprehensive character than these, are evidently needful. 

Such measures the great Creator has provided in the revo- 
lution of the heavenly bodies. The diurnal, annual, and 
secular movements of the globe on which we dwell, give rise to 
exceedingly various celestial phenomena, which as the prin- 
cipal hands of a complex dial plate, indicate the lapse of time. 

The best measures of time must of course be those which 
are most obvious, regular and universal, and in these and 
other respects, there are no standards that can for a moment 
compare, with the apparent and real movements of the sun and 
moon. The motions of the planets are slow, inconspicuous, 
and variable ; now forward, now retrograde ; difficult to detect, 
and observed by very few. The motions of the comets are 
still more irregular, and are for the most part altogether lost 
to sight ; but those of the sun and moon are universally con- 
spicuous, they combine regularity with variety, and revolutions 
of considerable rapidity, with others of a slow and stately cha- 
racter, including some whose periods are of enormous duration. 
Above all, the sun and moon exercise an unrivalled dominion* 
in the control of terrestrial movements and changes. They 
combine, and that to a marvellous extent, the two distinct 
elements of potency and periodicity. While they originate 
and rule almost all the physical changes continually taking 
place upon the surface of the globe, they are eminently 
periodic, and from the combination of these two elements it 
results, that they alone of all the heavenly bodies, create and 
control terrestrial times and seasons. We name the primary 
periods which they measure, days, months, years ; and all our 
times and seasons are either these, or multiples of these. 

In investigating the question of Times and Seasons, we will 
commence then by considering the almost boundless dominion 
exercised by the sun and moon, over the inorganic and organic 



236 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

worlds, and we will then advance to the subject of the perio- 
dicity of their movements, and the relation of these and other 
natural times and seasons, to those revealed in the Word of God. 



Solar and Lunar Dominion in the Inorganic World. 

" And God made two great lights ; the greater light to rule the day, and 
the lesser light to rule the night. And God set them in the firmament of 
the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over 
the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God said, let 
them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years." — Gen. i. 

The inspired writings were never intended to reveal to men, 
those truths of science, which their own God-given intelli- 
gence would ultimately enable them, by means of humble, dili- 
gent, and patient observation, to discover. Yet the Scriptures 
never darken counsel by words without knowledge, involving 
scientific blunders, and they often use, in a passing way, 
expressions which harmonize with the teachings of the most 
advanced modern science. 

The statement above quoted, that God made the sun and 
moon "to rule," is one of these. To rise to a conception of the 
vastness and universality of solar influence in the creation and 
control of inorganic and organic terrestrial change, is difficult 
for us even now, and must have been impossible for the ancients. 

Yet that this great light of our globe, is also its great ruler, 
is beyond all question, and is a point we must seek to 
establish, for the sake of those who scarcely recognise its 
full import, before we endeavour to unfold some of the chrono- 
logical laws of this dominion. 

So numerous and important are the effects which Almighty 
Power accomplishes through solar and lunar agency, that the 
sun and moon may be said to drive the whole clockwork of ter- 
restrial nature. The swift and ceaseless translation of the earth 
through space ; the curving of its path and its retention in an 
annual orbit ; the slow secular alteration of the direction of its 
axis ; the periodic donation and withdrawal of various degrees 
of light and heat, with resulting days, and nights, and changeful 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 237 

seasons ; the movement and circulation of all winds, from the 
gentlest zephyr to the most terrible tornado ; the circulation of 
all water currents, including on the one hand, the innumerable 
rills and rivers of the land, and on the other, the equally count- 
less currents of the ocean ; the whole phenomena of tides, with 
their varied and vasts results; and that of rains, from the up- 
raising of waters in the form of vapour, and their transporta- 
tion as clouds, to their condensation and descent in fertilizing 
showers ; the formation and fall of dews, of snow, of hail ; the 
control of all-pervading electric, magnetic, and chemical 
changes ; these, together with the constant exercise of the most 
potent of all physical influences, in the development and sup- 
port of vegetable and animal life, constitute a sum of solar and 
lunar operations, which seems to leave but little to be effected 
by other agencies. 

It is needful that we should recall some familiar scientific facts, to justify 
this statement and give it its due weight. 

First, then, as regards the relation of soli-lunar influence to inorganic 
changes, and primarily to the continual change in the earth's own position ; 
i.e., to the earth's varied and complicated movements, be it remembered 
that every atom in the universe attracts every other atom with a force inverse 
to the square of the distance. Such is the great and universal law of 
gravitation. What then must be the attractive power exercised on our globe 
by its closely-attendant satellite, the moon, which is a world 700c miles in 
circumference, with a mass estimated at 78,000,000,000,000,000,000 of 
tons ? And how stupendous and overmastering must be the attractive force 
brought to bear upon the earth by the supreme central orb of the system, 
which is 700 times greater than all the planets put together, and a million 
times larger than the earth itself ! A ponderous luminous globe, equal to 
a million worlds in magnitude, is ever exerting on our world, all its might 
of irresistible attraction. The globe we inhabit, vast relatively to us though 
it be, yields to its influence, as the wave to the wind ! 

The earth moves in its orbit 120 times more swiftly than a cannon ball. 
This almost inconceivable velocity, imparts to it, of course, an inconceivably 
strong impulse or tendency to fly off at a tangent, and move on in a straight 
line, from every point of its orbit. It is for ever struggling with tremendous 
energy to be free from its lord paramount, seeking, with all the force of 
the well-nigh irresistible laws of motion, to break away into space and 
escape beyond the influence of the sun's light and heat. But it may not 



238 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

be ! The great ruler of the system asserts his absolute dominion ; no laws 
of motion can resist the superior law of his attraction ; the earth owns her 
complete subjection, and is compelled to travel continually in her elliptical 
orbit around the sun. Yet the struggle is maintained age after age, and 
age after age the victory rests with the sun. When, at one part of her orbit, 
the earth's speed is increased to its maximum, she has power for awhile to 
increase her distance from the central orb round which she so reluctantly 
circulates. Further and further she retires, as if approaching the inde- 
pendence and the straight line to which she inclines ; but as she retreats her 
speed diminishes, and when it has reached a minimum, the never relaxed 
attraction of the central sun is felt with increased power, and she is obliged 
slowly to approach again the distant but resistless ruler. Distance and 
velocity may change within certain limits, but the earth's orbit, and the 
period in which she journeys through it, are invariable, owing to the 
supreme overmastering dominion of the sun. 

Other influences exerted on the earth, as that of the moon, and that of 
her sister planets, are not without their effect ; but they are no more able 
permanently to change the earth's orbit, or alter her period, than are the 
sticks or stones of the river bank, able to stay the rushing river. 

Again : steady though the earth's axis seems to be, pointing faithfully 
to the pole star, yet, in obedience to solar and lunar influences, it changes 
slowly its direction in the course of ages, so that the pole star of to-day, is 
not the pole star of the creation, nor will it be the pole star of a thousand 
years hence. This change in the direction of the axis of the earth, causes 
the entire starry firmament, to seem to revolve around the ecliptic, and 
makes the sun appear to fall back, through all the signs of the zodiac, in a 
direction contrary to that of its annual movement. This revolution, which 
occupies the immense period of 25,850 years, is called the precession of the 
equinoxes, or the advance of the equinoctial points. This is a year on a 
grand scale to our earth, a revolution occupying hundreds of centuries, per- 
formed under the double influence of solar and lunar attraction, and illus- 
tating strikingly the complete and perpetual subjection of our globe, to 
these greater and lesser lights. 

There is a second motion of the axis called "nutation," (nodding or 
tilting), caused by the moon's attraction alone. It is owing to a change in 
the plane of the moon's orbit, which causes the place of its intersection with 
the ecliptic to vary month by month, and year by year, for 19 years, in 
which period the series of changes is completed. During half that time, 
the axis of the earth is slightly tilted in one direction, and during the other 
half in the other ; an instance of purely lunar dominion. 

And on a grander scale than any of these., is the ruling power of the 
greater light displayed. It is an ascertained fact, that the sun, instead of 
being fixed and motionless in the heavens, as was at one time supposed, is 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 239 

leading his whole train of attendant planets, with their satellites, on an 
immense and immeasurable journey through space. At the rate of four or 
five hundred thousand miles every day, the sun is drawing his magnificent 
train after him, our globe included, in a direction which can be distinctly 
traced, but whose far-sweeping orbit and amazing period, no power of man 
has been able to calculate. 

It is therefore evident, that in obedience to the sun's attraction, and, in a 
much smaller degree, to that of the moon, our globe is continually per- 
forming movements which are vast, varied, and complex. 

They range from daily, monthly, and annual effects, to. secular changes 
of enormous though calculable period, and to some whose periods are in- 
calculable. 

The slowness of some of these movements, the amazing velocity of others, 
the variety of their form, and the vastness of their sweep, fill the mind 
which contemplates them as affecting the globe on which we dwell, with 
awe and admiration, and with a profound sense of the reality of solar and 
lunar dominion. The rule of these worlds over our own, is not in word, 
but in power. It is a rule, unlike the most despotic rule with which men 
are familiar, that makes itself felt at all times, in all places, in spite of all 
counteracting influences, and it is a rule that nothing can in the long run 
resist; apt image of the power exercised by Him of whom Gerhardt wrote, — 

" He everywhere hath sway, . 
And all things serve his might ; 
His every act pure blessing is, 
His path unsullied light." 

And not only does the earth itself perform these marvellously complex 
and mighty motions under soli-lunar influence, but the very same power is 
the cause of almost all the incessant changes and movements which take 
place on its surface, and in its constituent elements. 

Nothing in all its vast extent, as a moment's reflection will show, no single 
atom in the material substances which form and clothe the crust of the earth, 
is long at rest. And this unending and infinitely varied movement, may be 
traced to the influence of the sun and moon. Their rule not only embraces 
the greatest things, but is felt also by the least. The huge world itself sub- 
mits to it, and eveiy drop of water, every leaf, every insect, is similarly 
subject. 

It is principally by means of its attraction that the sun governs the mo- 
tions of the globe ; but it is more through its heat, its light and its actinic, 
magnetic, and electric influences, that it operates on the atmosphere of our 
earth, on its seas and continents, on its flora and fauna, and on mankind. 
These forces, acting separately or in combination, produce almost all the 
changes and movements of matter which we witness, from the hurricane 
that cools and clears the heated atmosphere, to the opening of the rosa-bud, 
and the painting of the petal or the leaf. 



240 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Its heat is the first great means by which the sun originates terrestrial 
change and motion. Heat, as is well known, expands and so rarefies all 
matter. The amount of solar heat received by the earth is enormous. It 
has been calculated that on one square mile exposed at noon under the 
equator, 26,000 tons of ice would be melted in an hour; and fifty million 
times this amount of heat is actually received by the earth from the sun every 
hour. Were this amount of heat evenly distributed over the earth's surface, 
it would, in the course of a year, suffice to heat to the boiling point, an 
ocean of frozen water, sixty miles deep. 

The amount of heat received by any one part of the earth's surface, de- 
pends mainly on the altitude fii the heavens, attained by the sun in that 
particular locality. The higher the sun rises, the hotter are its beams, and 
the longer the period during which its light and heat are enjoyed. 

When we remember that the three forms in which matter exists, solid, 
liquid, and gaseous, are due to different degrees of heat, we at once per- 
ceive the importance of solar heat, in relation to the state of inorganic 
matter. The results of its presence or absence, are seen at a glance, in the 
contrast presented by the tropic and frigid zones ; the flowing seas and 
rivers of the one, and the frozen floods and icebergs of the other, are due 
solely to the increase or diminution of solar heat. 

The vast inorganic changes in the surface of the earth which geology 
reveals, were brought about mainly by the same cause. The slow degra- 
dation of its solid constituents was due, then as now, to the alternate action 
of heat and frost, aided by the continual beating of the waves of the ocean, 
driven by winds, themselves the result of varying degrees of heat. To the 
flow of rivers and ocean currents, (which spring ultimately from the same 
cause) was due the dissemination and diffusion of these abraded matters, 
and their re-arrangement in fresh deposits. The violent volcanic action 
which from time to time upheaved the aqueous strata, is itself partially 
traceable to the same cause, for the increase of pressure over large spaces 
in the beds of the oceans, occasioned by the immense transfer of matter just 
alluded to, naturally produced diminished pressure over corresponding 
portions of the land, and the elastic force of subterranean fires, repressed 
on the one hand, and released on the other, broke forth in the tremendous 
upheavals and eruptions of the geologic eras. 

But it is in the case of the atmosphere surrounding our globe, that the 
effect of the sun's heat is most apparent. It is kept in a state of ceaseless 
and complicated motion by the variations of solar heat. The steady perio- 
dical trade winds and monsoons, are simply the currents of colder air which 
rush in to fill the spaces, in which, by the excessive heat of the rays of a 
vertical sun, the air has been rarefied to an extreme degree. They are an 
effect produced by the sun, in his apparent annual progress from one tropic 
to the other. So the familiar land and sea breezes, which may be recog- 
nised on every seaboard, though most distinctly in the tropics, arise from 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 241 

the unequal heating of the land and the water. From its low conducting 
power, the land during the hours of sunshine receives and retains more heat 
than the water. The superjacent atmosphere becomes more rarefied in con- 
sequence, and ascends, while the cooler air from the sea, flows in to fill the 
vacancy. In fact, fickle and uncertain as the winds appear, they are all 
the result of law, and all more or less directly produced by solar he?.t. In 
Europe the winds succeed each other in an order always the same, and so 
marked as to be called "the law of rotation of the winds." Where solar 
heat is greatest, as in the tropics, atmospheric changes are most violent ; 
where it is most constant, the general direction of winds is steadiest, as in 
the trade winds. In short the sun draws about the wind, as the loadstone 
the needle ; and its dominion over the atmosphere is as complete as it is 
over the solid globe. 

Nor is the world of waters any exception to the rule of solar dominion. 
The whole system of water-circulation, for the cleansing, support and nour- 
ishment of the world, is worked by solar power ; the sun is the ever-acting 
pump or heart, by which the supply is raised from the great oceanic reser- 
voir. Its heat lifts the water in vapours to the sky ; these vapours are 
transported by the heat-caused winds of which we have spoken, and con- 
densed by the withdrawal of heat, into rain, snow, hail, or dew, as the case 
may be. Thus summer heat leads to mists and rains, and when excessive, 
to tropical deluges ; thus sunset is followed by the fall of dew, and the 
winter diminution of solar heat, by snow, and hailstorms. 

The results accomplished by this water supply, are of the highest possible 
importance in the physical world. The circulation of water, is to the globe, 
what the circulation of the blood is to the animal frame ; it is the great 
means by which life is supported, and by which the elements of corruption 
and decay are removed. In each case the circulation is complete. " All 
the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full ; unto the place from 
whence the rivers come, thither they return again." The sparkling springs 
and mountain rivulets, the murmuring brooks, the flowing rivers, and the 
broad estuaries, are the continual returning of this life-sustaining water 
supply, to the ocean from which the sun originally lifted it. This water- 
circulation, together with all its marvellous effects, in cleansing, nourishing, 
beautifying, moving, transporting, disintegrating, depositing, accumulating, 
channelling, changing, etc., is carried on from year to year, and age to age, 
simply by solar influence. The power required for the work, and actually 
exerted by the sun is enormous. It has been calculated that the production 
of one day's steady rain, over an area equal to that of the county of Middle- 
sex, demands power, equivalent to the mechanical force which would be 
requisite to raise 1,000,000,000 tons, to a height of three miles. What 
then must be the solar force expended in the constant work of watering th* 
whole world ? 



242 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Nor is this all ! The ocean reservoir is itself a maze of currents ; no 
portion of the mighty deep is ever perfectly quiescent. From its surface to 
its lowest soundings, and from pole to pole, its waters are in ceaseless cir- 
culation. A large number of its currents have been tabulated, and are laid 
down on our charts ; some of them are hundreds, and even thousands of 
miles in length. Their existence is clearly traceable to the effect of solar 
heat. The heated waters of the Gulf of Mexico, becoming lighter as they 
expand under the vertical rays of a tropical sun, flow off like oil, from the 
top of the heavier water which rushes in below to take their place, and 
guided by the conformation of the adjacent continent, and the direction of 
the prevailing winds, cross the Atlantic and form the well known " Gulf 
stream," whose waters are perceptibly warmer than the ocean through 
which they run. Similar warm currents are constantly flowing north- 
ward from the tropics, and cold counter-currents returning from the poles. 
Thus the cold of extreme northern latitudes is modified, while ice-floes and 
icebergs are transported southward, and melted in the solar ray ; marine 
life, both animal and vegetable, is preserved and propagated ; ships are 
carried to their destinations, and the equilibrium of nature maintained ; and 
it is the sun which is the source of all this motion in the depths of the sea, 
as in the heights of the atmosphere. 

It is mainly to the moon that we are indebted for that marvellous, world- 
wide, daily-recurring, and most beneficent movement of the waters known 
as the tides. It is impossible to overrate the value of the ebb and flow of 
the tide to man. It is a mighty scavenger in the first place, and a most in- 
expensive and precious mechanical power in the second. By the attractive 
power of the moon, operating all over the world, the ocean is heaved up at 
opposite sides of the globe in two broad waves, which travel round the 
world, steadily following the advancing moon. Two similar but lesser 
waves follow the track of the sun, and the high bi-monthly wave known as 
spring tide, is caused by a combination of these two. The nearness of the 
moon, gives it over the waters of the ocean, a power greater than that of 
the larger but more distant sun. 

There is no terrestrial phenomenon which manifests so marked and steady 
a periodicity as this ebb and flow of the waters of the sea ; and there are 
few whose general effect is more beneficial. But for it, our shores, where 
rivers run into the ocean, would become vast stagnant deltas of corruption ; 
sources of pestilence and death. Cities and towns naturally grow up on the 
banks of rivers, and have an inevitable tendency to pollute them. But 
twice a day, thanks to the tidal wave, their impurities, instead of being suf- 
fered to accumulate in their channels, or at their mouths, are carried out to 
sea, and lost or rendered harmless ; a most important advantage to mankind. 

A transport service of enormous extent is also performed by the tide, on 
coasts and on rivers, and where wind and steam are not available. 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 243 

The heavier traffic carried on by large ships and in barges, is often taken 
in tow by this quiet but powerful tug, which performs without expense, an 
amount of mechanical labour, the money value of which would be difficult 
to calculate, even for one large city. 

The close connection between tidal phenomena and lunar movements, is 
demonstrated by the fact that the tides have their cycles, which have been 
reduced to tables, and found accurately to coincide with cycles of soli -lunar 
change. For many years tide-tables were constructed from the results of 
observation independently of science. But Mr. Lubbock, a mathematician, 
convinced that more accurate tables might be framed on a scientific basis, 
undertook the extensive labours needful for their preparation. Finding that 
regular tide observations had been made at the London Docks, from 1795, 
he took nineteen years of these, purposely selecting the length of a cycle of 
the motions of the lunar orbit ; constructed tables for the effect on the tide 
of the moon's declination, parallax, and hour of transit ; and was able to 
produce tide-tables founded on the data thus obtained, which were more 
exact than those which were compiled from observation alone. 

The sun exerts mighty and mysterious influences over the earth, inde- 
pendently of his attraction and of his heat. That there is a close connection 
between solar and lunar force, and magnetism, has been abundantly demon- 
strated, though the nature of that connection is still, to a great extent, a 
problem awaiting solution. 

Distinct diurnal, monthly, and annual variations in the direction of the 
magnetic needle, have been discovered, indicating the existence of some 
hidden, but close, relation between the revolutions of the sun and moon, 
and this potent and all-pervading force. Universal magnetic variations, 
accurately and constantly correspond with the changes which take place in 
the position of the sun and moon with reference to the earth. ' ' All the 
magnetic elements, are subject to periodical variations, dependent on the 
position of the sun with respect to the meridian, the 'period of which is ac- 
cordingly, the solar day." "They are subject also to a small variation 
dependent on the position of the moon with respect to the meridian ; " * 
and to a third irregularity which is annual in character, attaining its maxima 
and minima in the spring and autumn in the northern hemisphere, and vice 
versa in the southern. 

Besides this, the magnetic declination changes slowly at all parts of the 
earth, in the course of centuries. Thus in the year 1580, and onwards to 
the year 1657, the declination of the magnetic needle at London was in an 
easterly direction, but constantly decreasing. At the latter date it disap- 
peared altogether, and for some years the magnetic meridian coincided with 
the astronomic. After the year 1660 the declination became westerly ; it 

* "Treatise on Magnetism." H. Lloyd, D.D., Provost of Trinity Col- 
lege, Dublin. 



244 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

attained its maximum in this direction in the year 1815, and has ever since 
been diminishing, and returning towards the true astronomic meridian as 
before. 

In addition to these diurnal, monthly, annual, and secular variations in 
the direction of the magnetic needle, there is an eleven years' cycle of electric 
and magnetic change, corresponding constantly and accurately, both in its 
duration, and in its periods of maxima and minima, with the eleven years' 
cycle of solar change, or that of the increase and diminution of sun spots, 
whose very remarkable periodicity was discovered by Schwabe of Dessau. 

The periods of scarcity and abundance of the spots on the sun, succeed 
each other every five and a half years, so that in eleven years, the sun passes 
through all its stages of purity and spottiness: that is, about nine times in 
the course of every century. Both the beautiful electric phenomena called 
the aurora borealis, and the magnetic currents which influence the compass, 
are closely connected with these spots on the sun, though in what manner 
cannot be explained. Magnetic storms, as they are called, or sudden and 
powerful currents which cause the needle to jump and jerk violently at the 
same moment, all over the earth, and singularly brilliant and widespread 
aurorae, have been observed to correspond with remarkable outbursts of 
light, in or near some of the solar spots. The years 1857 to 1S61 were re- 
markable for spots : in September, 1859, a most singular appearance was 
noted by two separate observers, unknown to each other, and in different 
parts of the world. Great spots were on that day visible on the disc of the 
sun, and suddenly a brilliant luminous appearance, like a cloud of light 
more dazzling than the sun itself, appeared close to one of the spots ; in 
about five minutes it swept across and beside it, travelling over a space 
which could not be less than 35,000 miles in that brief space of time. What 
was this? An explosion of gas? A conflagration? It is impossible to 
say ; but observations made at the time prove, that the earth was in a per- 
fect convulsion of electro-magnetism at the moment. The self-registering 
magnetic instruments at Kew, which are always at work, recording photo- 
graphically every instant, the positions of three differently arranged mag- 
netic needles, showed, when examined subsequently, that each of the three 
mcde at that moment a strongly marked jerk from its former position. 
Auroras were seen at the same time, even in parts of the world where they 
are rarely visible ; as near the equator, and in South Australia. In some 
places the electric telegraph refused to work, and at several towns in 
America the telegraph men received severe electric shocks. At Boston, a 
flame of fire followed the pen of Bain's electric telegraph, which writes down 
the message on chemically prepared paper. There can be no question 
whatever that the solar phenomena, whatever its nature, had a direct and 
instantaneous terrestrial effect \ and the fact is a new proof of solar dominion 
in tie inorganic world. 



CHAPTER II. 
Soli-lunar Dominion in the Organic World. 

effects of light and heat on the development and 
distribution of plants and animals and of the hu- 
man race. — diurnal and seasonal changes in rela- 
tion to health and disease. 

WE have traced the supreme and all-pervading influence 
which the " two great lights " appointed to rule the 
day and night exert, in the production of inorganic terrestrial 
change. It remains to observe their effect on organized exis- 
tences, on plants and animals, and on man himself. In this 
wide and interesting realm, as in the previous one, we shall 
find that solar influence is supreme. 

Light and heat are the most powerful of all agents in the 
quickening and support of animal and vegetable life, and of 
these the sun is of course the great source and centre. By its 
presence or absence, are caused our day and night; and by 
its elevation or depression, our seasons. These, in their varied 
alternations, set in motion and control the entire world of 
organized existence. 

What simplicity and sublimity in these solar revolutions and 
their results ! The dawning of day is the signal for the world's 
awaking from that deathlike sleep which is the child of dark- 
ness ; with the rising of the sun the flowers open, the birds 
burst forth into song, and everywhere is seen the stirring of 
life and activity. The duration of the day sustains and nour- 
ishes the infinitely numerous and complicated organic move- 
ments and revolutions it has awakened, and its termination 
reproduces universal silence and repose. 

Were the days considerably to lengthen or shorten, were the 
seasons to change or cease, how immense and disastrous would 



246 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

be the results to all organized existences ! The permanence of 
seed-time and harvest, day and night, cold and heat, has been 
promised by the sure word of a gracious and bountiful Creator, 
and the accomplishment of that promise is effected by the per- 
manence and stability of the earth's actual relations with the 
sun. These may slightly vary in the course of the prolonged 
secular changes, discovered by astronomic observation, but 
compensating powers exist which keep these changes within 
very narrow limits, and provide for the maintenance of equi- 
librium, thus securing that uniformity of solar influence, which 
is needful for the continuation of terrestrial life. 

The inclination of the axis of the earth, to the plane of her 
orbit, for instance, is at present undergoing a steady, though 
very slow diminution. Were this to continue, unchecked, or 
to accelerate, a time must come sooner or later, when the 
equator and the ecliptic would coincide, and thus destroy the 
present succession of the seasons. 

But this catastrophe will never happen ; the all-wise Creator 
has provided for a continuance of the works of his hands 
Before the movement of the earth's axis in this direction can 
produce any perceptible results, in changing the climate of any 
part of the globe, it will cease. The axis will, under fresh 
influences, remain steady for a time, and then commence a 
retrograde movement, which will restore it to its original posi- 
tion. It will thus oscillate to and fro in the ages to come, 
without ever deranging to the slightest extent, the climate of 
the various parts of the earth. 

The extent of solar influence in the organic world, is mar- 
vellous to contemplate. The sun is the glowing ever acting 
heart of organic nature ; the succession of day and night are 
the pulsation, the systole and diastole, the contraction and 
expansion of that heart. The sun is the all-important reser- 
voir of life-supporting power, constantly sending its royal tide 
of vitalizing light and heat, through all the arteries of the 
mundane system, to its uttermost extremities, penetrating its 
utmost recesses and lowest depths, with its life-giving warmth. 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 247 

Vegetable life, without exception, is generated under the sun's 
quickening influence ; without it, not a seed would germinate, 
not a blade would spring, not a leaf would shoot, not a bud 
would burst, not a petal would unfold, not a flower would 
bloom, not a fruit would ripen. It alone raises and distils the 
dews and rains which feed and nourish the entire world of 
plants ; it alone dyes the field and the forest with their verdure ; 
it alone paints the blossom with its beauty, and tints with hues 
of loveliness both earth and heaven. It gives birth to the 
breezes, which stir the movements of every leaf and branch, 
scatter seeds and perfumes, and strip away all that has 
withered or yielded to decay. It is the joyful parent of spring, 
and the fruitful fount of summer wealth and autumnal glory. 

Animals are equally indebted to the sun. Without it none of 
the innumerable forms of animal life could for a moment exist. 
Without its warmth all muscular power would be paralysed, the 
frozen blood would fail to circulate, respiration would cease, and 
life would inevitably become extinct. Its rising and its setting, 
its shining and withdrawing, its ascent in summer, its decline 
in autumn and winter, and return in spring, control the cycles 
and create the boundaries of all the phases of animated nature, 
the sleeping and the waking, the stillness and the activity, the 
silence and the song, the action, the passion, and the repose of 
innumerable tribes of living creatures, peopling air and earth 
and seas. 

Man walks in its light, labours in its heat, basks in its smile, 
rejoices in its glory. It is the constant and irresistible ruler of 
days, and years, and seasons, and is enthroned as such, from 
generation to generation, and from age to age. In all these 
respects, it is the most glorious and sublime of all the material 
emblems of Him, from whose creative fiat, it of old derived 
existence and dominion, and by whose unfailing power it is up- 
held ; of Him who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King 
of kings and Lord of lords, the eternal and overflowing Source 
of light and love. 

As the moon only reflects the sun's light in a very modified 



248 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

degree, and no perceptible portion of its heat, it exercises little 
direct influence on organized nature. Its indirect action upon 
the organized forms contained in, or affected by, the many 
seas, estuaries, and tidal rivers of the world, is very considerable. 
The existence of the immense variety of plants and animals 
which live on the shores or boundaries of sea and land, is to a 
large extent conditioned by the ebb and flow of tides. To 
man, the moon is a useful and beautiful night lamp, and an 
invaluable chronometer, while by its daily, world wide, tidal 
movement, it is as we have seen, next to the sun, his -most 
powerful natural aid. It rules for him the night, and regulates 
his calendar, indicating by its movements, in conjunction with 
the sun, the measures of time which he universally adopts and 
follows. 

A few familiar facts, illustrative of the above statements, may serve to 
give them the weight they deserve, and if any apology be needful for re- 
calling natural phenomena, with the existence of which many if not most 
are familiar, it must be found in the necessity which we are under, of firmly 
establishing the great truth of soli-lunar dominion over terrestrial move- 
ment and change, in order to the due appreciation of the subsequent portion 
of this treatise. 

Be it then remembered that the sun not only produces day and night, 
and the succession of seasons in each particular locality, regulating by this 
means, the growth and activity of organized nature, but by its various 
degrees of elevation in different latitudes, it causes all the varieties oi 
climates, and through these, the development and distribution of vegetable 
and animal life throughout the world. These various degrees of elevation, 
causing the sun to afford varying degrees of light and heat, produce the 
different zones into which our globe, as regards climate, is divided. The 
principal zones are the equatorial zone, the tropical zones, the subtropical, 
the warmer temperate, the colder temperate, the sub-arctic, the arctic, and 
the polar zones. 

Now life, whatever may be its origin, clearly depends for its continuance, 
on the physical conditions by which it is surrounded. According to the 
degrees of moisture or drought, heat or cold, the plant or animal flourishes, 
or languishes and dies. It is only in the case of certain plants and animals, 
that "acclimatization" under non-natural circumstances is possible, and 
even with these, it is possible only within certain limits, and by the greatest 
care. The flora peculiar to a region of excessive drought, will not survive 
removal to a region of excessive humidity, nor will ferns and marsh plants 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMLNION. 249 

thrive in the desert. It is obvious, therefore, that on a globe where the 
sun produces such diversity of climate, life must exist under widely diversi- 
fied forms. No region, save the extreme polar perhaps, is utterly destitute, 
of it, but each has its own peculiar development. The intertropical regions 
of the earth, having in greatest perfection the conditions favourable to life, 
or in other words having a large share of solar heat and light, have an 
exuberant gitnvth of vegetable life and a redundance of animal existence. 
This decreases in each zone as we proceed towards the poles, till we reach 
the boundary, where- a minimum of solar light and heat forbid the exis . 
tence of any form of life. 

Since temperature similarly decreases, as we ascend from the level of the 
sea into the higher regions of the atmosphere, vegetation varies, not only 
according to latitude, but according to altitude. The Alpine traveller may 
pass through the climates of the various zones in one day. He leaves the 
rich vineyards, and the flowering myrtle and pomegranate, the fruit-bearing 
orange and lemon-trees behind him, in the valley ; passes through woods 
of oaks, sweet-chestnuts and beeches, as he mounts the lower slopes ; and 
amid pines and birches, as he gains the higher parts of the mountain, till at 
last he finds only the short fine occasional pasture grass, and subsequently 
nothing but lichens and mosses, edging the beds of perpetual snow and ice. 
The vine disappears before he has climbed two thousand feet ; the chest- 
nuts have vanished at three ; the oak fails to put in an appearance at four, 
and the birch long before he has climbed five thousand feet. The spruce- 
fir greets him as high as 5>9°° feet, but even it goes no further. For nearly 
two thousand feet above this last of the trees, the beautiful rhododendron 
and other shrubs, cover immense tracts of the mountain side ; the her- 
baceous willow, the saxifrages, the hardy dark -blue gentian and the grasses 
creep up to eight thousand feet, but only lichens and mosses go right up to 
meet the never melting snow which caps the mountain top. 

It is the same in the world of waters. Marine plants are equally dis- 
tributed in zones, and have also a vertical arrangement. Depth regulates 
heat and light for aquatic vegetation, and each successively deepening 
zone has its own peculiar forms of life. The ocean is divided into 
littoral, circumlittoral, median, infra-median, and abyssal or deep-sea 
zones; in this last only the microscopic "diatoms" exist, at a depth 
of over six hundred feet. The ordinary algae scarcely descend half that 
depth. 

Animals have less precise geographical limits than plants, their powers 
of locomotion and self-dispersion modifying the influences which climate 
and external conditions have upon them. But there is a well marked 
horizontal and vertical arrangement of animals, from the equator to the 
poles, and from the sea level to the loftiest heights of land, and to the 
greatest depths of ocean. Thus the larger carnivora are pretty much 



250 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

confined to the tropics, as also the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, 
the crocodile, boa, and larger reptiles, the ostrich, flamingo, parrots, hum- 
ming birds, and the generality of birds of very brilliant plumage, together 
with a most varied and exuberant insect life, which for variety, size, activity, 
and brilliancy, attains its maximum in Brazil and the East Indies, decreas- 
ing towards the temperate zone. 

The useful domestic animals — the horse, the ox, the sheep, the dog, are 
specially characteristic of the temperate zones, while the arctic regions have 
the polar bear and the reindeer, the musk ox, the wolf, the fox, and the 
sable : few species, but many individuals, and all sober and quiet in hue, 
and clad in warm furs. Reptile life does not exist in the arctic zone.. 

It is the same as regards the sea-animals, their range is by no means 
universal. In the torrid zone are found a vast variety of genera and of 
species, and in colder latitudes, fewer species, but enormous numbers of 
individuals. So the fishes and shell-fish of the sunny tropic are of beautiful 
tints and hues, while the seals and whales of the arctic regions, are sombre 
and uniform in colour. The seal and the walrus never visit the torrid zone, 
nor are sharks ever seen in polar seas. The great majority of the food 
fishes are only found in perfection in the cool waters of high latitudes ; and 
though the sea water contains everywhere the same constituents, the coral 
insect builds his reefs only in the subtropical expanses of the ocean. 

When we pass on to notice the effect of solar dominion on human develop- 
ment, and on the distribution of men on the earth, we at once perceive that 
it must necessarily be of a far more indirect character, than that exercised 
over plants and animals, and more difficult to trace. 

Man has not only power of locomotion, but he is imbued with curiosity, 
ambition, and many other motives, which impel him to wander, and there- 
fore, though it is now confessed by all naturalists, that scientifically speaking, 
all the various races of mankind constitute a single species of a single genus, 
yet we find this species, domesticated under every variety of climate, and able 
to subsist almost equally well between the tropics and in the polar regions. 
At first sight this would seem to indicate, that as far as the development of 
the race is concerned, mankind is independent of climatic differences. But 
this is far from being the case, as a little consideration will show. Of the 
five great families into which the human race is divided, the Caucasian, 
Mongolian, Ethiopian, Malay, and American, the distinguishing charac- 
teristics have a marked relation to the climate, and consequent productions 
and physical peculiarities, of the lands inhabited by each. Man, it is true, 
can struggle against, or modify the physical conditions which surround him, 
but he is never independent of them. There can be no doubt that our own 
moderate climate, is more conducive to mental and bodily vigour, than is 
the relaxing heat of the great plains of Hindostan ; nor that the slight 
differences of the seasons to which we have to adapt all our habits and 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 251 

pursuits, have a stimulating effect on energy and activity, lacking to nations 
who are subjected to excessively hot summers and cold winters. But for 
our insular situation, Englishmen would probably never have been the 
traders and adventurers they are, and but for our natural supplies of coal 
and iron, we should never have acquired the mechanical and manufacturing 
character we now possess. Climate, food, and landscape, influence mental 
as well as bodily character. We speak of "depressing weather," of an 
" enervating " or of a " bracing" climate ; of " inspiring " scenery, and so 
on, and the idea conveyed by these expressions, that the outer world affects 
the inner man, is true. 

The White or Caucasian variety of the human family, is the one which 
exhibits in their highest degree, all the intellectual and moral powers of 
human nature. It belongs to the temperate zone in either hemisphere. 
" Man presents to our view his most perfect type at the very centre of the 
temperate continent, at the centre of Asia-Europe, in the regions of Iran, 
Armenia, and the Caucasus, and departing from this geographical centre, 
in the three grand directions of the lands, the types gradually lose the beauty 
of their forms, in proportion to their distance, even to the extreme points 
of the southern continents, where we find the most deformed and degenerate 
races, and the lowest in the scale of humanity." " The indigenous man of 
America," says M. Guyot, "bears in his whole character, the ineffaceable 
stamp of the peculiarly vegetative character of his country. Living con- 
tinually in the shadow of those virgin forests, which overspread the country 
he inhabits, his whole nature has been modified thereby. The very copper 
hue of his complexion, indicates that he lives not like the Negro, beneath 
the scorching sunbeams. His lymphatic temperament betrays the pre- 
ponderance in his nature of the vegetable element. . . . The Indian 
has continued the man of the forest ; he has seldom elevated himself above 
the condition of the hunter, the lowest grade in the scale of civilization ; he 
has never ascended to the rank of the pastoral man. With him no domestic 
animals are maintained to feed him with their milk, or clothe him with 
their' fleeces, as they are by the nomadic races of the Old World. From 
one to the other extremity of America we find the same lamentable spectacle. 
The people of the elevated table-lands of Mexico and Peru are the only 
exceptions to this picture, and this exception goes far to establish the in- 
fluence of the vegetative and humid lower plains of America" 
■ Thus it is evident that the advancement of man in civilization, depends 
in great measure on the physical conditions by which he is surrounded, and 
these in their turn depend, as we have seen, to a very large extent, on solar 
influence. 

As the elevation or depression of the sun, with its resulting modifications 
of light and heat, in different latitudes, controls the distribution of plants 
and animals, and of the races of mankind ; so its elevation or depression at 



252 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

different hours of the day and at different seasons of the year, at any one 
given place, influences the development of human and other organic life, at 
those hours and seasons, and thus more or less affects the period of birth, 
the diurnal and annual process of growth, the increase or diminution of 
nervous and ?nuscular power and activity, the changes and periods of disease, 
the stages of decay, and the season and moment of death. Statistics prove 
that the greatest number of births occur in December, February, and March, 
and the fewest in June, July, and August — a fact that can be accounted for 
only, by some annual or solar influence. 

All paroxysmal diseases appear at some particular hour of the four and 
twenty. It is a well known fact, that gout and all arthritic diseases, as well 
as many purely nervous affections, attack their victims at two o'clock in the 
morning, and cholera usually just before daybreak. The paroxysm of a 
quotidian ague comes on at four or five o'clock a.m., a quartan at four or 
five p.m., and a tertian at noon or soon after. A quotidian comes on when 
the consumption of oxygen in respiration is at its lowest point, a tertian 
when it is at its highest. They also appear at one certain definite point in 
the deviation of the magnetic needle, and terminate at another. The baro- 
meter also is at its minimum variation when the paroxysms come on, and 
at its maximum when they end. 

Hippocrates says : " Diseases of every kind may arise in any season of 
the year ; others, however, increase, and are excited only in particular 
seasons." He then gives a list of the complaints peculiarly rife in each of 
the four seasons, which, though written two thousand years ago, is perfectly 
applicable to the case of Greece, in the present day. 

" Spring and fall " have long been popularly known, as the seasons in 
which cutaneous eruptions are most apt to appear, and the habits of some 
of the exanthemata render it probable that there is a determination to the 
skin at these seasons. In pellagia, according to Dr. Holland's observa- 
tions, the cutaneous affection remits in autumn, and recurs in the spring, 
with increased severity. 

Diseases which arise from exoteric causes, at different periods of the year, 
may be arranged in two classes. Increase of heat produces decrease of 
density in the atmosphere ; at each inspiration less oxygen is conveyed to 
the lungs in summer therefore, than in winter, less carbon is in consequence 
excreted by the lungs, and hence the necessity for increased action on the 
part of the liver, during the hot months. Thus liver complaints are more 
frequent in hot weather and in hot countries. The perspiratory organs of 
the skin are also more active in summer, and other secretions are propor- 
tionally diminished. Various diseases result from these and similar changes 
in the seasons. Another class arise from purely external causes, as hay 
fever, marsh and jungle fevers, sunstroke, etc. The action of remedies 
varies also under these circumstances. Diseases of the respiratory organs, 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 



253 



being largely affected by temperature, are more frequently fatal in winter, 
than at any other season.* 

Nor is it in the case of disease only, that this all-prevailing soli-lunar 
influence is perceptible. It has also a marked effect on certain perfectly 



Deaths from Diseases of the Respiratory Organs. 
,q.~ f Summer 

1840 I Autumn 

o ( Winter ...... 

4 (Spring .«•«>. 

Deaths from Measles. 

tC^C Summer ...... 

l *4°l Autumn . . . . -, 

tS„t (Winter ....», 

1841 [Spring ...... 

Deaths from Scarlatina. 

o (Summer 

1840 I Autumn 

(Winter 

1841 ( Spring 

Deaths from Small-pox. 

1840 I Autumn 

„ (Winter 

1841 ^ Spring 



2981 
2999 
4732 
3943 



301 

251 
346 
102 



436 
534 
294 
125 



213 

381 
850 

354 



Diseases. 


Deaths in Summer and 
Autumn, 1840. 


Deaths in Winter and 
Spring, 1841. 


Respiratory Organs . 
Measles .... 
Scarlatina .... 
Small-pox. 


5982 
552 
970 

594 


8675 
448 
419 

1204 



Lancet, 1842-3. Vol. ii., p. 829. 

Schweig inquired into the mortality at various hours of the day. The 
following table shows the result : — 



Winter . 
Summer 



4-5. 


Morning 

5-6. 


6- 7 . 


7-S. 


8-9. 


95 
120 


109 
119 


116 
99 


115 
100 


113 
107 



254 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

natural and healthy phenomena, of which, in a subsequent chapter, we will 
speak more particularly. 

How it affects these, it may be difficult to explain, but that it does so is 
an incontestable fact. These phenomena are based on healthy and natural 



Winter . 
Summer. 



4-5- 


5-6. 


6-7. | 7-3. | 8-9. | 9-10. 


103 
in 


114 

119 


81 77 105 in 

132 82 &6 | no 



The following tables show the hour of the day most influential in deter- 
mining death from consumption : — 

Deaths in Berlin in 1836 from Phthisis. 

Midnight to six o'clock a.m. 
Six o'clock a.m. to noon , 
Noon to six o'clock p.m. . 
Six o'clock p.m. to midnight 

Total 

Deaths from Phthisis in Carlsruhe in Eleven Years. 
Midnight to she o'clock a.m. . 1S7. Ratio per 1000 239. 
Six o'clock a.m. to noon . . 218. ,, ,, ,, 2S0. 



165. Ratio per 


1000 


220. 


220. „ „ 
197. „ » 
167. „ „ 


35 


294. 
2& 3 . 
223. 


749 cases. 




IOOO. 



Noon to six o'clock p.m. . 
Six o'clock p.m. to midnight 



195. 

1 So. 



iotal 



. 780 cases. 1000. 

Med. Quarterly Remew. No. 35, p. 175. 





Maximum. 


Minimum. 


Variations in the barometer :— 






{a) Near London, 1807 to 1S16 


December 


July. 


(b) In the Deccan 


December or 
January 


July. 


Variations in the hygrometer 


January 


Juty- 


,, ,, thermometer 


July or August 


January. 


Amount of evaporation 


July 


January. 


Number of births (Belgium) 


February 


July. 


,, „ deaths (Begliuni) 


January 


July. 


Cases of Insanity 


June or July 


December or 

January. 


,, ,, Suicide .... 


Summer 


W inter. 


Crimes against persons 


June 


January. 


., property . 


December 


July. 



Dr. Laycock. Lancet, 1842-3, p. 828. 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 255 

revolutions of the system, and may be dependent on cyclical processes 
inherent in the system itself, or on periodic agencies acting from without, 
or they may result from a combination of these two j that is, the causes may 
be esoteric, exoteric or endexoteric. 

The most important of these alternations, proper to the system is that of 
activity and repose. During sleep the nervous system undergoes a remark- 
able functional change, the brain and nerves being more or less physiolo- 
gically paralysed, as the sleep is more or less profound. * 

The foregoing facts prove that in appointing the sun as the 



* " The period of repose or sleep may be denned generally as extending 
from ten or eleven o'clock, p.m., to four or five, a.m. ; and I would here 
remark, that there is a numerous class of affections of the nervous system, 
which I have elsewhere termed neursemic, resembling sleep in this, that 
they are dependent on some temporary change in the functions of the brain 
itself, apparently connected with a disturbance of the capillary circulation 
of that organ, or, perhaps, with some passing change in the composition oi 
the blood, but, like sleep, unconnected with any appreciable alteration in 
the structure of the brain. Many, if not all affections of this class are periodic; 
and it is obvious that these, as well as all other diseases primarily depen- 
dent upon morbid functional derangement of the nervous system, ai'e most 
likely to appear when the natural functional derangement is greatest: that is 
to say, about two o'clock in the morning, when sleep is most profound. 
Probably connected with this periodic change in the nervous system, are the 
equally periodic changes in the functions of the heart, lungs, etc., observed by 
physiologists to occur diurnal ly. Dr. Prout found the consumption of 
oxygen gas in respiration to vary during the day as follows : — The 
maximum consumption is from eleven o'clock, a.m., td one o'clock, p.m. ; 
it then gradually decreases to a minimum about half-past eight, p.m., at 
which point it is stationary until half-past three o'clock, a.m. The amount 
then suddenly increases ; at first slowly, to its maximum, about noon ; and 
from this point it almost immediately begins to sink, at first quickly, to its 
minimum, at half-past eight, p. m. Dr. Prout conceives that these varia- 
tions are regulated by the presence or absence of the sun. 
The circulation has also its regular periods of change. So long ago as 
181 5, Mr. Knox inferred, from a series of observations, that during the 
morning the mere change from the horizontal to the erect posture renders 
the pulse more frequent by about fifteen or twenty beats ; at mid-day the 
increase is about ten, and in the evening four or six. Mr. Knox, some 
years subsequently, confirmed these results, and showed that the diurnal 
revolution, both as to numbers and excitability, is altogether independent 
of food or exercise. More recently Dr. Guy has come to almost similar 
conclusions. According to his experiments, ' ' the effect of change of posture 
is greatest in the forenoon, and least in the afternoon, the effect in the even- 
ing being the mean between the other two ; and the effect produced by 
change of posture on the same frequency of the pulse in the afternoon, 
forenoon, and evening, respectively, is as the numbers eight, nine, and ten." 



256 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

great time-measurer, the Creator selected the physical ruler of 
the world, the lord paramount of all its movements, the source 
of its entire life and activity, of its rotation, revolution, heat, 
light, seasonal differences, magnetic impulses, and tidal 
changes ; of its winds, waves, and currents ; its rains, snows, 
and frosts ; of the actual distribution of its plants and animals ; 
and of many important phenomena connected with the course 
and development of the human race itself. 

The sun and moon are all-powerful in their influence over 
the earth ; no one, no thing, is unconscious of their presence 
or absence ; they control this globe, in all its movements and 
changes, from the most obvious and sublime, to the most 
occult and complicated ; not an atom of matter is uninfluenced 
by them, nothing can resist their might or alter their move- 
ments. Those movements, conspicuous, periodical, regular, 
and adapted as they are to the necessities of the animal and 
vegetable creation — produce our times and seasons. The 
periods measured by their simple primary revolutions, we call 
days, months, and years, and our ordinary computation of time 
is by fractions or multiples of these ; while their vast and se- 
cular motions afford superior standards, for the measurement of 
longer and slower changes in the history of the earth, and of 
the human race. 

The facts then of the all-controlling/^;^ and of the accu- 



Dr. Guy states that the observations of Nick, published at Tubingen in 
1828, are equally corroborative of Dr. Knox's views. 

Diurnal changes in the insane. A diurnally periodic state of excite- 
ment of the system generally has been observed in the insane, as ctpriori 
might be anticipated. Dr. Allen made observations regarding this point 
on the insane patients under his care. . . . The first period of increased 
excitement is from four to half-past nine in the morning, and the second 
period is from four to half-past nine in the evening. The periods of 
diminished excitement extend from half-past nine, a.m., to four, p.m., and 
from half-past nine, p.m., to four, a.m., the hours corresponding very closely 
with Dr. Prout's observation. It is obvious that these changes in 

THE NERVOUS, RESPIRATORY AND CIRCULATORY SYSTEM MUST NECES- 
SARILY INFLUENCE IN SOME DEGREE THE TIMES OF ACCESSION OF 

all diseases, but particularly of the paroxysms of interna ittents. " — Dr. 
Laycock. 



SOLAR AND LUNAR DOMINION. 257 

rate periodicity, of the two great rulers of our globe, the sun 
and the moon, impart to the greater and lesser soli-lunar 
measures of time a vast and supreme importance. Any sys- 
tem of chronology which neglects the periods resulting from 
their sole and joint movements, is an unnatural and unstable 
system. On the other hand the fact that the events and cycles 
of human life and progress, of history and of prophecy, from 
the most minute to the most extensive, measured by soli-lunar 
chronology, fall into order, and arrange themselves into a sym- 
metrical system, — such a fact, if it can be demonstrated, will 
be in evident harmony with the established order in nature. 

The periods resulting from combined solar and lunar move- 
ments, must therefore, in the investigation of the world's chron- 
ology, be allowed to have a place of paramount importance. 
To ignore them, is to ignore the golden clue to the complex 
labyrinth ; while patiently and consistently to employ them, is 
to follow the guidance granted by the great Creator, through 
the phenomena of creation, — the only way of attaining scientific 
truth. 

We turn therefore now to observe the remarkable fact, that 
many vital phenomena of world-wide and unceasing occurrence, 
and many historic and prophetic periods, of the first import- 
ance in the annals of humanity, have, when measured by these 
minor and major soli-lunar revolutions, a singular, septiform, 
chronology, which stamps them as parts of one and the same 
system. 



SECTION II. 

The Law of Completion in Weeks, 

CHAPTER I. 

THE WEEK IN RELATION TO THE PERIODICITY OF VITAL 
PHENOMENA. 

PERIODICITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF INSECTS, FISHES, BIRDS 
AND MAMMALIA. — PERIODICITY IN THE GROWTH AND FUNC- 
TIONAL ACTIVITY OF MANKIND IN HEALTH AND IN DIS- 
EASE. 

THE birth, growth, maturity, vital functions, healthy revo- 
lutions of change, diseases, decay and death, of insects, 
reptiles, fishes, birds, mammals, and even of man himself, are 
more or less controlled by a law of completion in weeks. 

The hatching of the ova of insects occupies in a large num- 
ber of cases, intervals varying from two to six weeks. Their 
continuance in the caterpillar or larva condition is seldom less 
than seven days, and varies from this period to four weeks, six 
weeks, or longer periods. The exuviation, or change of skin, 
which occurs during this larva state, frequently takes place at 
intervals of seven days.* 



* From an interesting series of papers contributed by Dr. Laycoclc, to the 
Lancet, in the years 1842-3, on the subject of Periodicity in Vital Phenomena, 
we extract the following : — 

" I found the most remarkable illustration and confirmation of the law in 
insects. The changes to be noticed in insects as being regulated, as regards 
the time they occupy, by this law, are as following : — 

"1. The hatching of the ova. 

"2. The caterpillar, or larva state, and the moults which take place at 
that stage of development. 

"3. The pupa, or chrysalis period. 

"4. The imago state, or puberty. 

"The ova are hatched in periods varying considerably in length. The 
shortest is half a week or seven (half) days, as in the wasp, the common 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 259 

The moults of insects, the exuviation of serpents, the 
renewal of the plumage of birds, and of the coats of other 

bee, and ichneumon ; in some, as the cecidomia tritici, the period is one 
week; in others it is a week and a half, as, for example, the black cater- 
pillar and the gooseberry grub (tenthredo capreea). In the majority oj 
insects however it is from two weeks to six weeks. 

" The ova of the glow-worm occupy six weeks ; of the mole cricket only 
four weeks, in hatching. 

"The larva. The period passed by insects in the larva will vary in 
length as the insect varies ; but I think it is seldom less than seven days. 
In the common bee it is six days and a half, in the humble-bee seven days 
exactly, hi day papiliones it is four weeks, in moths six weeks. In many 
insects it is a long period, continuing for months. The larva of a new 
British wasp, of the genus oplopus, occupies twelve weeks ; namely, from 
the period when its two first segments coalesced to the throwing off of its 
exuvice was three weeks, and from the time of the latter change to its full 
development, nine weeks. It is worthy of notice that the time occupied 
between each exuviation of the larva is limited ii: the same manner as the 
period of the larva state itself is limited. Thus, ihe latter period of the 
common black caterpillar is twenty-one days, or three weeks ; during this 
period it exuviates, or changes its skin three times, at intervals of seven days 
each. The wood-piercer bee is in the larva state four weeks; of these four 
weeks it fasts exactly one, just before it enters the pupa state. 

" The pupa. The period spent in the pupa state is the most in accordance 
with the general law of limitation by weeks ; in fact, the more exact the 
observations are as to the length of this period, the more confirmatory are 
they of the general rule. For example, Mr. Denny had three larvas of the 
sphinx atropos, which went into the earth on August 22nd, 24th, and 
September 2nd, respectively. They appeared as perfect moths on October 
16th, 18th, and 27th; or, in each case, in exactly eight weeks. If the pupa 
state is entered late in the summer, the perfect insect does not appear until 
the following spring. Larvae and ova will also hybernate in the same way; 
but in all cases the period occupied is a definite number of weeks, some are 
forty, others forty-two, and forty- eight weeks. 

" The imago. I have not been able to collate observations as to the 
duration of the imago state, very few having been made ; but the vital 
actions of the perfect insect appear subject to the same general law. Thus, 
twenty or twenty-one days after the queen bee has begun to lay the eggs of 
drones, the bees begin to construct royal cells. If the impregnation of the 
queen be retarded beyond the twenty-first day (Huber) or twenty-eighth 
(Kirby and Spence), of her whole existence, she lays only male eggs ; and 
Huber states that after the twenty-eighth day, under these circumstances, 
she loses all feelings of jealousy towards the young queens in the nymphine 
state, and never attempts to injure them. Some insects attain puberty 
almost immediately after leaving the puparium ; others are a considerable 
time before their organs acquire sufficient hardness, especially some of the 
beetle tribe. Thus the newly-disclosed imago of cetonia aurata remains a 
fortnight under the eartn, and that of the lucanus cervus not less than three 
weeks." 



260 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

animals are similarly regulated by a law of weeks. So are the 
periods of the la>ing of eggs, and of incubation, in many birds. 
The common hew, as is well known, sits three weeks ; the 
pigeon two, after laving laid eggs also for two weeks. The 
seal calves on the rocks, and suckles its young for two weeks, 
when the calf casts its coat and goes into the water. 

The ova of salmon are hatched in 140 days, or twenty weeks ; 
and those of the aquatic salamander in two weeks or fifteen 
days. But the habits and physiology of fishes and reptiles are 
comparatively little known or observed, so that few confirm- 
atory facts, can be drawn from this department of the animal 
kingdom. 

The periods of utero-gestation in many of the mammalia, and 
of incubation in numbers of birds, have been accurately and 
carefully noted. Out of one hundred and twenty-nine species 
observed by Dr. Laycock, sixty-seven had periods which were 
an exact number of weeks or months, twenty-four were so 
within a day, and only four were exceptions to the rule, as far 
as could be ascertained.* 

* "I turned my attention to the periods of utero-gestation in lower 
animals, as I felt anxious to learn whether any such limitation of the period 
by weeks could be traced as affecting them. I tabulated the periods of ges- 
tation in various mammals, and the period of incubation in birds, as they 
were stated in works on natural history, and as I could make them out from 
personal inquiries whenever opportunity offered. Of course rigid accuracy 
could not be looked for in observations of this kind, but, such as they were 
they confirmed the general law of limitation by weeks observed in the sex. I 
collected tolerably trustworthy observations of this kind referring to one 
hundred and twenty -nine species of birds and mammals (some being, indeed, 
rigidly exact), and in sixty-seven of these the periods of utero-gestation and 
incubation were a definite number of weeks or months ; twenty-four ex- 
hibited periods being within a day of the definite number, and in the 
remaining thirty-nine the period was so loosely stated as not to be of much 
weight either for or against the general law, although by far the greater 
number were decidedly favourable. Altogether I judged that there were 
only four available exceptions. As examples of this law may be stated — ■ 
in the grallidse, tetraomdae, and other birds of about the same size, the 
period is three weeks ; in the anatidse, four weeks ; the cygnidas, six weeks ; 
but in small birds, as the musciparse, only two weeks. 

" The facts I have briefly glanced at are general facts, and cannot happen 
day after day in so many millions of animals of every kind, FROM LARVA OK 
OVUM OF A MINUTE INSECT UP TO MAN at definite periods, front a mere 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 2 6i 

And it is well known that when we mount still higher in the 
scale of animated existence, and study the entire system of 
vital periodicity impressed by its great Creator on the human 
family, this law of limitation by weeks becomes conspicuous and 
all-pervading. From the cradle to the grave, and from before 
the cradle, from the day of conception to the day of death, 
every man, woman and child of our race, is strangely amenable 
to it. Consciously to one sex, unconsciously, but none the 
less really to the other, there is an alternate loss and gain of 
physical substance, every four weeks* 

In the human family, the period of utero-gestation, is ac- 
curately foi'ty weeks, nor do differences of age, climate, or cir- 
cumstances, cause any variation in this period. It is the rule, 
though it has of course exceptions. 

Dr. Denman, in his work on midwifery, states, " The common 
time of utero-gestation is forty weeks. ... I do not mean 
that it is completed to a minute or an hour, as has been sur- 
mised, because the birth of the child may be delayed by a mul- 

chance or coincidence ; and although temperature, food, domestication, and 
other modifying circumstances, may and do interrupt the regularity with 
which the various processes, I have alluded to, are conducted, yet upon the 
whole it is, I think, impossible to come to any less general conclusion than 
this, that, in animals, changes occur every three and a half, seven, fourteen, 
twenty-one, or twenty-eight days, or at some definite number of weeks.'''' — Dr. 
Laycock. 

* * e It is well known to physicians, that there is a large class of diseases, 
the symptoms of which recur at regular intervals of time. It so happened 
that I had appointed myself the task of investigating those nervous affec- 
tions belonging to this class, and I directed my inquiries in particular to 
the rule or law by which the interval between the paroxysms is regulated. 
Of course the phenomena of menstruation first demanded my attention as a 
normal periodic movement. In the course of my inquiries I ascertained that 
the interval between each such period was not always four weeks ; but 
occasionally two weeks, three weeks, five weeks, and even six weeks. Facts 
being such, I determined on counting the interval by weeks. The circum- 
stances connected with menstruation led necessarily to those connected with 
the period of utero-gestation. This, it is well known, is usually forty 
weeks ; but here again I found exceptions to the general law, like those just 
now mentioned, that is to say, the period was exceeded or shortened by weeks" 
—Dr. Laycock. 

From some "statistical details respecting the menstrual periods," given 
in Schweig's researches, we learn that " the results of 200 menstruations in 



262 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

tiplicity of accidents. But parturition will be accomplished, or 
the parturient disposition will take place, before or at the expir- 
ation of forty weeks from the time of conception. Nor does it 
seem reasonable that a law of nature, which is not altered by 
the differences of age, by the diet, by the extremes of climates, 
by the severities of slavery, cr the indulgences of luxury, 
should be changed by circumstances of less importance." * 

Thus throughout all ages, and in all countries, the initial 
stage of human existence, the intra-uterine life of every one 
born into the wide world, is measured by weeks ; and not till 
forty weeks have run their course, does the human being at- 
tain independent existence. These are phenomena of uni- 
versal occurrence, and of fundamental importance in the 
natural history of mankind ; they are leading and unques- 
tionable physiological facts. The periodicity of life, and 
the periodicity of birth, need no demonstration, for the expe- 
rience of every individual bears witness to it, as well as to 
the fact that it is regulated by a law of weeks. And if this 



thirty-four individuals, showed an average of 27-8 days, the maximum 
number in the table being 28 days." (Medical Heview, July, 1844.) 

Even exceptional cases to the ordinary monthly period, are regulated by 
a weekly variation. "I sought the explanation of such cases, and found 
that, in one half of the three-weekly cases, the type was explained by ovario- 
uterine disease of an organic nature, or by chlorosis ; and in more than one 
half of the six-weekly cases, the patient's health was habitually bad, owing 
in two instances to uterine disease, which was also the case with the one 
that assumed the fortnightly type." — (Tilt, "On Uterine Inflammation.") 

There is an analogous monthly, gain and loss of substance and weight 
in the case of men, which was first discovered by Sanctorius. "Nature, 
animate or inanimate, is full of periodically recurring phenomena. The 
periodicity of our planetary system is felt by man, for he experiences, 
by insensible perspiration, a constant periodical loss, which was first 
discovered by Sanctorius, who established — that even those who are in 
a perfect state of health, and observe the utmost moderation in living, once 
a month increase beyond their usual weight to the quantity of one or two pounds, 
and at the month's end return again to their usual standard, and that this 
is accompanied by an important change in the secretions. A further 
analogy between menstruation and the monthly oscillation in the urinary 
discharge referred to, as observed by Sanctorius, is that, ' before the afore- 
said crisis happens, there is felt a heaviness in the head, and a lassitude all 
over the body, which symptoms are afterwards removed.' " — (Tilt, p. 204.) 
* Denman, vol. i. p. 306. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION LN WEEKS. 263 

be the case in health, and with normal functions, so is it also 
with disease, and in abnormal derangements. From time 
immemorial, it has been observed that fevers, and intermit- 
tent attacks of ague, gout, and similar complaints, have 
a septiform periodicity ; that the seventh, fourteenth, and 
twenty-first, are critical days. 

In his investigation into the phenomena of fevers, Dr. Lay- 
cock states that, 

" Whatever type the fever may exhibit, there will be a par- 
oxysm on the seventh day, and consequently this day should 
be distinguished by an unusual fatality or number of crises. 
For analogous reasons the fourteenth will be remarkable as a 
day of amendment, the last paroxysm of a quotidian taking 
place on that day, and the last of a tertian on the day 
previous ; for observation has established that if a tertian is 
to cease about the fourth paroxysm (the seventh critical 
day), the second paroxysm will be more severe than the 
first or third ; but if the fourth be severe, and the fifth less so, 
the disease will end at the seventh paroxysm, and, of course, 
the change for the better, if this rule be applied to remittent or 
continued fevers, will be seen on the fourteenth day. Should, 
however, the exacerbation occurring on the thirteenth day end 
fatally, whether it be the seventh of a tertian or the fifth of a 
quartan, death will probably take place early on the fourteenth 
day, namely, about three or four o'clock, a.m., when the system 
is most languid." 

That these theoretical inferences are borne out by facts, all 
medical writers agree, and indeed it maybe proved numerically 
by tables of cases, compiled without the least reference to 
critical days.* 



* Forestius relates forty-eight cases of acute fever, without any reference 
to critical days ; five of these terminated on the fourth day, twenty-ixvo on the 
seventh, two on the eleventh, and seven on the fourteenth. The cases detailed 
by Stoll in his ' Ratio Medendi,' exhibit the same general fact ; the seventh 
and fourteenth days, and then the fourth and eleventh, are the most re* 
markable. 



264 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Nor is it in fevers alone that this law of septiform periodicity 
is traceable. Paroxysms of gout afford another illustration of 
its operation. 

" A fit of the gout going regularly through its stages in a 
robust subject, observes the following order : — 

" The patient retires to rest well, or perhaps in better spirits 
than usual, and is awoke at two o'clock in the morning by 
rigors, thirst, and other febrile symptoms, and with pain in the 
great toe, or heel, or other part. This pain and the febrile 
action go on increasing for exactly twenty-four hours, that is to 
say, until two o'clock, a.m., comes again, when a remission 
takes place, sometimes an intermission ; the interval it occupies 
being another nyctemeron, or period of twenty-four hours, at the 
end of which another febrile paroxysm comes on. And so 
paroxysm and remission or intermission alternate, until the fit 
terminates. A fit of the gout, under the circumstances stated, 
is a tertian intermittent (in the measure of its intervals), and, like 
a tertian, it terminates in fourteen days, or after seven paroxysms. 

11 If the patient go on luxuriating in his diet, the next fit, if 
left to flannel and patience, will be of a double length, or occupy 
twenty-eight days, and have fourteen febrile paroxysms, or ex- 
acerbations ; or it will be tripled, and be of six weeks' duration, 
and so go on increasing in length by a definite ratio of weeks, as 
the predisposing and exciting causes become more efficient, 
until the viscera and the general system become so deranged 
that no regular fit takes place." 

It is important also to notice, that not only is the week an 
evident measure in such fevers, and intermittents, but the 
half-week also. His investigations of the subject of vital perio- 
dicity forced this fact on the notice of Dr. Laycock, and 
its agreement with the periods of prophecy, leads us to call 
attention to his statement. 

" The complete day of twenty-four hours is the pathological 
period most generally noticed by physicians ; but, as I have 



See Lancet, 1842-3, vol. i., p. 128. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 265 



shown, there are also periods of three days and a half or seven 
half-days. This is, in fact, the ancient division of the whole day, 
or w^Orjixepov, into two parts. We must start with this half-day, 
or day of twelve hours, as the unit which will comprise the phe- 
nomena of the best-marked class of periodic disease, the inter- 
mittents. Dr. Graves is, I believe, the only physician who has 
made this observation, and applied it to pathology. He 
observed that, if this period were adopted, ' we should not count 
three days and a half but seven half-days : we would not say 
seven days, but fourteen half-days.' Reckoning thus, many of 
the anomalous critical effects, and critical terminations in con- 
tinued fevers, would, I have no doubt, be found strictly con- 
formable to some regular law of periodicity " * 

The operation of the law we are considering may be traced 
also in the growth of children and young people from infancy 
to maturity, in the duration of the human powers, in their 
fullest perfection, and in their gradual decay. 

Dr. Laycock divides life into three great periods, the first 
and last, each stretching over 21 years, and the central period 
or prime of life lasting 28 years. 

The first, which extends from conception to full maturity at 
21 years of age, he subdivides into seven distinct stages, 
marked by well defined physical characteristics, as follows : — 

" 1. Intra-uterine life ; 

" 2; The period between birth and the first dentition ; 

" 3. The time occupied by the first dentition ; 

" 4. The period between the first and second dentition ; 

" 5. The time of the second dentition ; 

" 6. The period between the latter and commencing puberty ; 

" 7. The time occupied in the evolution of the reproductive 
system. 

"The second great period will comprise three minor 
periods : — 

* Lancet, 1842-3, vol. i., p. 423. 



266 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

" i. The perfecting of adolescence, from 21 to 28 ; 

" 2. The climax of development, or status of life, from 28 to 
42 • and 

"3. The septenary of decline in the reproductive powers, 
extending from 42 to 49 (after which latter age conception 
rarely takes place). 

" The third great period comprises also three minor subdivi- 
sions : — 

" 1. The grand climacteric, from 49 to 63 ; 

u 2. Old age, from 6$ to 70 ; 

"3. The years of setas ingravescence, or decrepitude, from 
70 to death. 

" In fixing these epochs/' says Dr. Laycock, " I have fol- 
lowed the generally received septennial division, being reluctant 
to make any innovation thereon. It would I think, however, 
be more in accordance with modern science, to date, not from 
birth, but from the conception of the individual. If this be done, 
each great period, should be calculated as commencing forty 
weeks earlier." 

The process of dentition affords also illustrations of the 
operation of the law of septiform periodicity in vital pheno- 
mena ; * and viability, or the probability of life, is highest at 14 

* "The order of the development of the teeth in man is an interesting 
subject, as upon it we must principally rely for determining the periods of 
development in the system generally. Mr. Goodsir's researches are ex- 
ceedingly interesting, as marking this gradual hebdomadal evolution in the 
embryo and foetus, but are not sufficiently accurate for our purpose as to 
the time when the changes occur. Previous to the eruptive stage, or com- 
mon dentition, there are three phases of development ; the papillary, com- 
mencing about the seventh week of foetal life, the pollicitlar in the tenth, and 
the saccular in the fourteenth week, which continue until the eruptive 
stage, about the seventh month after birth, when the four central incisors 
present themselves. After this the other teeth appear at intervals not yet 
precisely fixed, the first dentition being terminated, however, by the end ot 
the thirty-sixth month. All is then quiescent for three or four years, or 
until the middle or end of the seventh year, when the first true molar makes 
its appearance, which according to Mr. Goodsir, is analogous to the milk 
teeth in its mode of formation, the permanent central incisors appearing 
about the same time." — Lancet, 1843-4, vol. hi., p. 255. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 267 

years of age. Dr. Laycock puts the results of his careful re- 
searches, into the five following propositions : — 

"1. Thafcthere is a general law of periodicity which regulates 
all the vital movements in all animals. 

" 2. That the periods within which these movements* take 
place admit of calculations approximately exact. 

"3. That the fundamental unit, — the unit upon which these 
calculations should be based, — must for the present be con- 
sidered as one day of twelve hours. 

" 4. That the lesser periods are simple and compound multi- 
ples of this unit, in a numerical ratio analogous to that observed 
in chemical compounds. 

" 5. That the fundamental unit of the greater periods is one 
week of seven days, each day being twelve hours ; and that single 
and compound multiples of this unit, determine the length of 
these periods by the same ratio, as multiples of the unit of 
twelve hours determine the lesser periods. This law binds all 
periodic vital phenomena together, and links the periods ob served 
in the lowest annulose animals, with those of man himself, the 
highest of the vertebrata. . . ." 

He concludes his investigation with the following words : — 
•- The sure and steady course of proleptical science will be 
from particulars to generals, and if its foundation be firmly 
established on severe induction, we may hope at some future 
day to extend its principles to the cycles of the seasons, and to 
comprise within its sphere, not only individual men and women, 
but societies generally, and even the whole human race. The 
axiom that the whole is equal to the sum of all its parts, is 
universally true, whatever the whole may be; and there is 
really no reason for despairing that we shall attain to a 
knowledge of the whole alluded to, (a knowledge which must 
necessarily be derived from a knowledge of its parts,) because 
those parts are microscopically small to the intellect. The 
boundaries of astronomical science have been pushed from 
small and obscure beginnings, into the infinite in space, time, 
and number ; and who can tell but that Providence may so assist 



268 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

the humble inquirer into nature, that science shall be extended to 
the infinite in littleness^ and so man be able to look down, 
by the light of philosophy, upon the varied phenomena of ter- 
restrial life, — their multifarious combinations and complexities, 
their cycles and epicycles, — as he looks into the planetary 
world ; and see nothing but order and simplicity where now 
there appears inextricable confusion." * 

" There is a harmony oj numbers in all nature ; in the force of 
gravity, in the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light, 
electricity, and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and 
plants, in the perceptions of the mind. The direction indeed 
of modern natural and physical science, is towards a general- 
isation which shall express the fundamental laws of all, by one 
simple numerical ratio. We would refer to Professor Whewell's 
'Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences,' and to Mr. Hay's re- 
searches into the laws of harmonious colouring and form. From 
these it appears that the number seven is distinguished in the 
laws regulating the harmoiiious perception of forms, colours, and 
sounds, and probably of taste also, if we could analyse our 
sensations of this kind with mathematical accuracy. "f 

There are probably few branches of natural science from 
which additional facts in confirmation might not be culled. 
But the above may suffice, for our object is less to trace the 
extent of the dominion of this law, than to prove its existence 
in nature. The realm of entomology recognises this law, 
ichthyology and ornithology do the same, and the mammalia 
equally bear witness to its prevalence. As to man, his birth, 
growth, dentition, development, maturity, vital functions, re- 
productive system, health, disease, life and death, all his 
times and all his seasons, are more or less distinctly con- 
trolled by the law of completion in weeks. His very pulse 
keeps time to the seven day period. Dr. Stratton states (as 
the result of several series of observations) that in health, the 
human pulse is more frequent in the morning than in the 

* Lancet, 1842-3. t Med. Review, July, 1844. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 269 

evening, for six days out of seven ; and that on the seventh day 
it is slower. * 

And man's life as a whole is a week, a week of decades. 
" The days of our years are threescore years and ten " and 
that by Divine appointment. Combining the testimony of all 
these facts, we are bound to admit that there prevails in organic 
nature a law of septiform periodicity, a law of completion in weeks. 
We turn now to consider, the prevalence of the same law in 
Scripture. 



Edinburgh Med. and Surgical Journal, Jan., 1843. 



CHAPTER IL 

The Week in Scripture. 

there is a chronological system in scripture.— it is a 
system of weeks. — this system is traceable through- 
out the law, the prophets, and the gospel. — the 
week in the mosaic ritual. — the week in jewish 
history^ — the week in prophecy. — the week of days 
— of weeks — of months— of years — of weeks of years 
— of years of years — of millenaries. 

FROM the foregoing facts it is abundantly evident that 
the hand of the Creator has regulated a vast variety of 
world-wide vital phenomena, by a law oj weeks : that a septi- 
form periodicity has been, by God Himself, impressed upon 
nature. 

The Holy Scriptures claim to be a revelation from the God 
of nature, and an orderly and consistent system of chronology 
is one marked feature of the sacred volume. Now it is a most 
noteworthy and indisputable fact, that this system is, fro?n first to 
last, a system of weeks : septiform periodicity is stamped upon the 
Bible, as conspicuously and even more so, than on nature. 

The whole of its chronology — beginning with the order of 
creation unfolded in its earliest chapters, including the entire 
order of Providence revealed in its succeeding portion, and the 
typical and actual chronology of redemption itself— is regulated 
by the law of weeks. The times prior to the existence of man ; 
the times recorded by the histories of the Pentateuch ; the 
times enacted by the Mosaic ritual; the times traceable in 
Jewish history ; and the times unfolded by the prophets, — all 
are without exception characterized by this feature. The 
actual length of the days of creation, whether longer or shorter, 
does not affect this statement, for the septiformity of creation 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 271 

chronology is equally clear, whatever may have been the mea- 
sures of the creation week ; and the Bible system includes, as 
we shall see, weeks on a great variety of scales. 

The Levitical law contained a ceremonial system which 
shadowed forth good things to come, and the chronology of its 
observances, which was one of its most marked features, was as 
typical as all the rest — typical of the chronology of redemption 
history. The Levitical chronology was a system of weeks on 
various scales of magnitude ; one which employed the main 
natural divisions of time, the day, month, and year, as units 
for its weeks, and which also employed the largest of these 
weeks, as a unit for still larger septiform periods. And as the 
complete chronology of the typical law foreshadowed the 
wonderful history of redemption, so the chronology of Old 
and New Testament prophecy, has reference to the same ; 
for prophecy is only history anticipated, as types are history 
foreshown in action. But the views of history given in 
divinely inspired prophecy, are wider, and more compre- 
hensive than can be found elsewhere, and therefore in pro- 
phetic chronology, we find periods of vaster scope — plainly 
foretold, or obscurely intimated — and above all a key to the 
whole plan of history. In this grand prophetic chronology, 
we trace the same system ; it is throughout septiform, it con- 
sists of a series of weeks. 

Here, the legal week of seven years, the week whose unit is 
a solar year, is multiplied tenfold (70 years) and seventy-fold 
(490 years) ; and here on the same principle, only on a higher 
scale, as the year had been previously employed as the unit of 
a week, so it is now employed as the unit of a year ; this is 
the year-day system of chronological symbolic prophecy. 

Weeks of such years are appointed as the measures of vast 
periods of history, distinguished one from the other by moral 
features, and by varied degrees of Divine revelation, such as 
the Patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian dispensations. 

In all these different departments of Scripture^ we shall find a 
uniform consistent chronological \A%&~-theweek reigns supreme; 



272 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

it measures alike the briefest and the longest periods, and can 
be traced in various forms, in the law, in the prophets, and in 
the gospel. It runs like a golden thread through the entire 
texture of the Bible \ and this fact alone, were there no other 
evidence on the point, proves a unity of design, pervading this 
collection of the writings of about forty different authors of 
various lands and ages, which argues it the product of one in- 
spiring mind, — the mind of the great Creator. On the world 
his hands have fashioned, and on the Word his Spirit has 
inspired, He has stamped in equally indelible characters, the 
week, as the divinely selected measure of human time. 

In connection with the first appearance of the week — on the 
opening page of Scripture in the narrative of the creation, — 
we find an exposition of its profound meaning, the moral object 
and end of God in its selection. It is the period that leads 
up to, and terminates in, the rest of God. We read, " On the 
seventh day God ended his work which He had made, and 
He rested on the seventh day from all his work which He 
had made. And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified 
it, because that in it He had rested from all his work, which 
God created and made." The same reason is assigned for the 
enjoined observance of the Sabbath, in the law given at Sinai : 
"Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work; but the 
seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God, in it thou 
shalt not do any work. ... for in six days the Lord 
made heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and 
rested the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the seventh 
day and hallowed it." 

The rest of God, and of man his creature, with God, in the 
enjoyment of the results of the work of God, — results which 
God Himself sees to be very good, — this is the end attained, 
at the close of the week ; this is the sabbath. This was the 
creation sabbath, soon, alas ! marred by sin ; this shall be the 
redemption sabbath, when the second great work of God, the 
new creation ie Christ Jesus, is complete. No sooner had 
sin destroyed the sabbath res;t of creation, than the great 



THE LAW OF C0MPLET70A JN WEEKS. 273 



Creator, in his invincible goodness, began to work again. 
" My Father worketh hitherto, and I work," said Christ ; and 
such is still the case, for redemption is not yet complete, and 
the rest of God, and of man with God, is still future. 

The Hebrew word translated "week" means seven, and would 
designate any period composed of seven shorter periods, whether 
days, weeks, years, decades, centuries, millenaries, or any other 
unit. The following were the various weeks, appointed under 
the Jewish ritual, for perpetual observance in Israel : — 

1. The week of days. Gen. ii. 2, 3 ; Exod. xx. 

2. The week of weeks. Pentecost. Lev. xxiii. 

3. The week of months. Jewish sacred year. Lev. xxiii. 

4. The week of years. Sabbatic year law. Lev. xxv. 

5. The week of weeks of years. The Jubilee. Lev. xxv. 
(i.) The Week of Days. 

Taking them in the above order, we glance first at the 
natural week, of seven days, established in Eden, and the per- 
petual observance of which was enjoined under the law. To 
this week the Divine hand has attached, as we have seen, the 
idea of labour issuing in rest, of the stages of creature develop- 
ment terminating in maturity, and thus of the attainment by 
the creature, of moral and spiritual perfection. The sabbath 
expressed the entire complacency of God, and the entire satis- 
faction of man, in all that God had created and made. 

This was the period appointed under the Levitical law, for 
many of those consecrations, which were the impartation of 
ceremonial or typical perfection. The process of consecrating 
Aaron and his sons, to the work of the priesthood, that they 
might minister before the Lord, for Israel, lasted seven days. 
(Exod. xxix. 35.) That also of sanctifying the altar, that it 
might become an altar most holy, imparting sanctity to all that 
touched it, lasted similarly seven days. (Exod. xxix. 37.) 

Thus also the period of the duration of ceremonial unclean- 
ness, was in a number of cases, limited by seven days, at the 
close of which ceremonial purity was restored. On the birth 
of a male child for instance, a woman was considered unclean 

T 



274 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

for seven days (Lev. xii. 2), nor could the child, daring that 
week, be circumcised. Circumcision could not take place till 
the eighth day. 

The firstborn of cattle devoted to God were not to be 
offered during the first seven days. " Seven days shall it be 
with its dam, and on the eighth day thou shalt give it to Me " 
(Exod. xxii. 30). " On the eighth day and thenceforth it shall 
be accepted for an offering made by fire unto the Lord " 
(Lev. xxii. 27). 

Various other ceremonial observances, of a similar nature, 
were enacted in Israel. Defilement from a running issue, or 
from an issue of blood, lasted seven days. (Lev. xv. 13-19.) 
The suspected leper was to be shut up seven days, and even 
after he was pronounced clean, he was still to tarry abroad out 
of his tent seven days. (Lev. xiii. 14.) Miriam, on account of 
her leprosy, was shut out of the camp seven days. (Num. 
xii. 14.) The house, or the garment infected with the plague 
Df leprosy, were similarly to be shut up seven days. 

Defilement by contact with the dead, also endured seven 
days, that is the ceremonial purity forfeited by this contact, 
could not be restored in less than seven days. (Num. xix. n.) 
Thus the purification of the men, after the slaughter of the 
Midianites, lasted seven days. (Num-, xxxi. 19.) 

It is much insisted on in the law that the feast of unleavened 
bread should last " seven days." Under pain of death, all 
leaven was, during this period, to be put away from Jewish 
dwellings. (Exod. xii.) The feast of tabernacles also lasted 
seven days : " Ye shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven 
days, and ye shall keep it a feast unto the Lord, seven days in 
the year ; it shall be a statute for ever in your generations : ye 
shall celebrate it in the seventh month ; ye shall dwell in 
booths seven days" (Lev. xxiii. 36, 39). 

On the occasion of the siege of Jericho, seven priests bearing 
seven trumpets, compassed the city with the men of war, for 
seven days, and on the seventh day they went round it seven 
times, when the city fell. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 275 

The week, with its concluding sabbath, is therefore deeply 
engraven in a variety of ways, on the whole Jewish ritual and 
history. Nor on Jewish history alone. Although in the 
Christian dispensation, the eighth day, or first day of a new 
week, is substituted for the creation sabbath, indicating that 
rest is to be found only in a new creation, only in resurrection, 
—yet still the weekly division of time, and the weekly day of 
holy rest, continue, witnessing as ever to the rest that remaineth 
for the people of God. For, — like the Lord's supper, which 
shows forth his death till He come,-^the sabbath, and the 
Lord's day which has taken its place, glance both backward 
and onward. The first day of the week recalls the glad morn- 
ing of the resurrection, the completion of the redeeming work 
of Christ, just as the sabbath recalled the conclusion of the 
creation work of God ; and it foretells the remaining rest, 
when they that are Christ's shall rise at his coming. Thus we 
may say, that three hundred thousand earthly Sabbaths line 
the road that lies behind the people of God, pointing each 
with outstretched hand, like so many guide-posts, in the same 
direction, and agreeing with overwhelming unanimity in their 
testimony to the blessed fact, that there remaineth a sabba- 
tism for the people of God. 

(ii.) The Week of Weeks. 

Next in order to the week of days came the week of weeks. 
This was the period appointed to elapse between the first two 
of the great annual gatherings of the Jewish sacred year, Pass- 
over and Pentecost. Of the deep meaning of these ordinances, 
as unveiled by the sequence of events, connected with the 
true paschal sacrifice, we pause not here to speak, as we shall 
have to allude to it, in another connection, further on. We 
simply call attention to the ordinance, as one instance of the 
law of weeks, impressed on Jewish ritual. " And ye shall 
count unto you, from the morrow after the sabbath from 
the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering, seven 
sabbaths shall b% complete. Even unto the morrow after the 



276 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

seventh sabbath shall ye number fifty days, and ye shall offer a 
new meat offering unto the Lord" (Lev. xxiii. 15). 

Thus in every Jewish year there occurred not only fifty-two 
weeks of days, each with its concluding Sabbath, but a week of 
weeks, with its closing Pentecostal celebrations, full of hidden 
hopes of resurrection rest. 

(hi.) The Week of Months. 

The entire circle of the feasts of the Lord, ordained in 
Leviticus, is comprised within the first seven months of the 
year. The sacred portion of the Jewish year therefore, its 
complete calendar of divinely ordained religious ceremonies, 
prefiguring the history of redemption, occupied a week of 
months. It commenced with the month Abib or Nisan, on 
the fourteenth day of which the Exodus took place, in memory 
of which the annual feast of Passover was instituted. There 
followed each in its appointed season, the feast of unleavened 
bread, and the first-fruit sheaf, the feast of weeks or Pentecost, 
the feast of trumpets, the great day of atonement, and the 
feast of tabernacles. This last was held in the seventh month, 
and with it closed, for the year, the special " feasts of the Lord." 
Thus the period marked off for holy convocations, from the 
Jewish year, was septiform in character; a week whose days 
were months, contained, by Divine direction, the observances of 
Israel's ecclesiastical year ; while the feasts themselves, and the 
order in which they occurred, had undoubted reference to anti- 
typical events, on the scale of ages. 

(iv.) The Week of Years. 

It was the will of God that not only the people, but the land 
of Israel, should keep sabbath. " The Lord spake unto 
Moses in mount Sinai, saying, Speak unto the children of 
Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land 
which I give unto you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto 
the Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years 
thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; 
but in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the 
land, a sabbath for the Lord : thou shalt neither sow thy 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 27'/ 

field, nor prune thy vineyard. That which groweth of its own 
accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the 
grapes of thy vine undressed : for it is a year of rest unto the 
land" (Lev. xxv. 1-5). The Hebrew servant similarly was to 
serve six years, and go out free in the seventh. (Exod. xxi. 2.) 

The period thus marked off had exactly the same character 
as the week with its six days of toil and seventh of rest ; it is 
simply the week on the scale of years. And it is worthy of 
notice that the observance of the ordinances respecting the 
land during the sabbatic years, was possible only by means of a 
stupendous miracle, to, be repeated every seven years. "If ye 
shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year ? behold, we shall 
not sow, nor gather in our increase. Then I will command my 
blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth 
fruit for three years " (Lev. xxv. 20, 21). Here was a law per- 
fectly harmonious as we have seen, and shall yet see more 
fully, with the order of sacred seasons observed by the Jews ; 
a law in which there was nothing foreign to their whole system, 
but which was on the contrary an integral p art of it, and yet it 
was made to depend, for the possibility of its fulfilment, upon 
a special periodical interposition of Divine power, as wide in 
its range, as the necessities of an entire nation. No merely 
human legislation would ever have originated such a law, on 
account of its incapacity to provide the conditions needful for 
its observance. This miracle in the land, was, on the scale of 
years, what the doubling of the manna, in the wilderness, was 
on the scale of days ; a miraculous arrangement, to render 
possible the keeping of the prescribed sabbath. There, the 
gift of manna was doubled every sixth day ; while in the land 
gf promise, the produce was trebled every sixth year, the 
object in each case being to secure the sabbath rest. 

(v.) The Week of Weeks of Years. 

The largest week ordained in the Mosaic ritual was the 
week of weeks of years, the period including therefore seven 
sabbatic years, with their intervening years of toil, forty-nine 
years. 



278 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

" Thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven 
times seven years ; and the space of the seven sabbaths of 
years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt 
thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth 
day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye 
make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye 
shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout 
all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a 
jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his 
possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. A 
Jubilee shall that fiftieth year be unto you : ye shall not sow, 
neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the 
grapes of thy vine undressed. For it is the jubilee ; it shall be 
holy unto you ; ye shall not eat the increase thereof out of the 
field. In the year of this jubilee ye shall return every man 
unto his possession " (Lev. xxv. 8-13). This larger week is 
perfectly harmonious in character with all the previous ones ; 
during its earlier portion, bondage, debt, and poverty lasted, 
at its close they passed away and disappeared. The jubilee 
was a year of rest and joy and liberty, that foreshadowed more 
than any preceding sabbath, the full and varied blessedness of 
the rest that remaineth for the people of God. Once at least in 
every ordinary lifetime, would this great prophetic ordinance 
arrive, laden with its wealth of joy and peace, and glowing 
with its beams of hope and promise. 

In the light then of these five enduring ordinances, — ordi- 
nances some of which are observed by the Jews even to our 
own day, — ordinances embodied in the Bible, and presented to 
the study of every generation of the people of God — in the light 
of the weekly sabbath observed from Eden onwards ; of the 
Pentecostal sabbath ; of the sevenfold sabbath of the final feast 
of tabernacles ; of the sabbatic seventh year ; and of the yet 
more sabbatic year of jubilee ; it is impossible to deny that 
a septiform chronology was divinely appointed in the elaborate 
ritual of Judaism. And further, since that ritual was unques- 
tionably typical, this fact may prepare us to find a similar 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 279 

law of weeks governing the chronology of the antitypical 
events. 

(vi.) The Week of Decades. 

But not in the Pentateuch only is this law of weeks to be 
traced ; it pervades the Old Testament, and embraces not Jews 
only, but Gentiles. Of the whole human race the words are 
true, " The days of our years are threescore years and ten , and it 
by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their 
strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off, and we fly away" 
(Ps. xc. 10). Human life is a week, a week of decades, and the 
last decade, the evening of life, is the time of rest rather than 
of action. But there is no sabbath in man's life, in the fullest 
sense of the word ; no rest, till it closes in the sad dark rest of 
the grave ; sin has introduced the curse instead of the sabbath, 
and death with its dreary gloom, ends the lifetime week of 
sinners. But the exception only proves the rule, and bears its 
testimony to the true nature of the week. The failure of bodily 
and mental power which takes place generally about the age of 
seventy, attests the operation of this law of septiform periodicity, 
on the entire human race, while the recognition of the fact by 
the psalmist suggests the perfect harmony of this providential 
arrangement, with all the sabbatic legislation we have been 
considering. 

This period of seventy years is besides a very notable one 
historically. It marked the duration of the captivity of Judah 
in Babylon. It was predicted by Jeremiah, that in consequence 
of their inveterate idolatry Israel should be carried captive by 
Nebuchadnezzar, " the whole land shall be a desolation, and an 
astonishment, and these nations shall serve the king of Baby- 
lon seventy years " (Jer. xxiv. n). And subsequently a second 
time the same limit was assigned : " For thus saith the Lord, 
after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon, I will visit you, 
and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to re- 
turn to this place" (Jer. xxix. 10). A dark and terrible week 
to Judah were those seven decades ; the daughters of Israel 
hung their harps upon the willows by the rivers of Babylon, 



28o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

and wept as they remembered Zion. The desolate land en- 
joyed her sabbaths, while her sons languished in exile. But 
this week also closed with restoration and liberty, when the 
Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, and her children felt 
like those that dream, as they sang, " The Lord hath done 
great things for us, whereof we are glad." 

(vii.) The Week of Weeks of Decades. 

It was towards the close of this long and dark week of the 
captivity, that there was revealed to Daniel a still larger week ; 
a week each of whose days was to equal the captivity week, a 
week of seven times " seventy years," or " seventy weeks" of 
years — a period of 490 years. This may be termed the re- 
storation week ; it was the time that elapsed between Arta- 
xerxes' decree to restore and to build Jerusalem, and the days 
of " Messiah the Prince," indeed it was revealed as measuring 
the interval. " Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people 
and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression and to make 
an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to 
bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and 
prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy." 

Had Israel known the day of her visitation, and received her 
Messiah when He appeared, what a glorious sabbath would 
have closed this week ! Its seventh day did actually include the 
incarnation and life of the Lord Jesus Christ, and, — since when 
He came unto his own his own received Him not, — it included 
also his atoning death, his triumphant resurrection, and the de- 
scent of the Holy Ghost; the rejection of Israel, the destruction 
of their temple, and the first gathering-in of the Gentiles. So 
that even on this scale of centuries, God has adhered to the law 
we have noted above, and brought in the day of the greatest 
blessings the world has ever known, as the seventh stage of a 
previous history. The period is however designated as " seventy 
weeks " rather than as one week — and it is therefore even more 
conspicuously an instance of the prevalence, even in long 
stretches of history, of the law of weeks. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 281 

(viii.) The Week of Years of Years. 

Scripture presents us — in symbolic prophecy — with a week 
on a scale of greater magnitude than any of these, in the 
" seven times " of Daniel. As we shall have to treat more 
fully of this in the following chapter, we forbear to enlarge on 
it now. It is a week of years, whose days are years, in other 
words a week, each of whose days consists of 360 solar years. 
Its second half is frequently mentioned in symbolic prophecy, 
under various designations which all indicate one and the same 
period, 1260 natural years. This gigantic week includes the 
entire " Times of the Gentiles," the times during which supreme 
power on earth, is by God committed to Gentile instead of 
Jewish rulers. It dates from the captivities, and is still run- 
ning its course, though rapidly nearing its close. 

(ix.) The Week of Millenaries. 

And all these various weeks, are included in a sublime week 
of millenaries, which is clearly intimated, if not distinctly re- 
vealed, in the Word of God. In the Apocalypse as we have 
seen, the glorious reign on earth of Christ and his saints, which 
is to be the world's real sabbath, and Israel's real jubilee, the 
antitype and fulfilment of the types and shadows of the all- 
embracing sabbatic law we have traced through Scripture — the 
great sabbatism — is six times over. spoken of as a period of "a 
thousand years." This millennial age, being the true sabbath of the 
world, must be regarded as a seventh day — the seventh day of a 
week, whose six preceding unsabbatic days, were of equal dura- 
tion with this its sabbath. So that the last page of the Bible 
shows, that the creation week whose occurrences are narrated 
on its first page, was the germ and type of the world's chrono- 
logy, and foreshadowed the whole course of time; that the 
sabbath of Paradise, pointed to a great sabbath of a thousand 
years, with which God — to whom a thousand years are as one 
day — has from the beginning purposed to bless mankind ; the 
seventh day of the great week of time, which is to introduce 
the eternal state — the new creation. 

The system of times and seasons thus unfolded, bears the 



282 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

stamp of divinity : there is a consistency and a grandeur about 
it, as well as an evident end and meaning, which are worthy of 
the Bible, worthy of God ! Its connection with creation, with 
the moral law, with the chronology of redemption, both typical 
and antitypical ; its connection with the most solemn and 
deeply interesting episodes in Jewish experience and history ; 
with the advent of Messiah, and with the most important events 
in his human life ; its relation to various and distant lands, and 
to so many important epochs, Jewish, Gentile, and Christian ; 
its existence amid the eras of history, and its adoption in 
the visions of prophecy, all these features unite to stamp it as 
Divine; while the fact that it is identical with the system im- 
pressed by the hand of God on nature, leaves no room for 
doubt on the subject. 

We have been considering not theories, but facts ; we have 
adduced, not opinions or fanciful interpretations, but a mass 
of unquestionable scientific and authentic historical evidence. 
Is it by chance, that the law of septiform periodicity is en- 
graven so widely and so deeply on the vital phenomena of the 
animal creation, and of the human family? Is it by chance 
that the existence, growth, and functional activity, of every 
individual of our race, is, both in health and disease, regulated 
by a law of weeks, of various magnitudes? Is it a mere 
curious coincidence, that a weekly rest, has from creation 
onwards been observed by men ? and that the Jewish nation 
for three thousand five hundred years, have acknowledged and 
obeyed a ritual system, whose constantly recurring periods from 
the briefest to the longest, were weeks of diverse dimensions ? 
Was it by accident that historical episodes like the Babylonish 
captivity, and the restoration era, were weeks of still greater 
magnitude, and that even the mighty dispensations of providence 
are measured by the same septiform scale ? 

No ! these facts are too far-reaching, too all-comprehending, 
too universal, to admit of any other explanation than the 
existence of what men call a law of nature, that is a rule 
ordained by the great Creator Himself. A law that regulates 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS, 283 

ten thousand phenomena, physiological] and historical, from 
the transformation of an insect, to the majestic revolutions of 
redemption history — a law which no power on earth can alter, 
nor any lapse of ages obliterate ; a law which, as we shall 
hereafter show, is inscribed in letters of light, by the glittering 
orbs of the solar system in their ceaseless revolutions, in the 
realms of space, such a law can have but one Source ; to no 
other can its enactment be attributed, than to the blessed and 
only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who only 
hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no man can 
approach unto, whom no man hath seen, nor can see, to whom 
be honour and power everlasting ! 

Our next chapter, unfolding the operation of the law of 
weeks in the general course of human history, will strengthen 
this conviction. 



CHAPTER III. 

The Week in History. 

scripture the chart of history. — preliminary questions 
as to historic and prophetic chronology. — the age of 
the human race. —old testament chronology. — the 

hebrew and the septuagint chronology compared. 

how are we to interpret the symbolic periods of pro- 
phetic chronology? — exposition and defence of the 

year-day system. moral features distinguishing the 

three great dispensations — the patriarchal — the 
jewish — the christian. — chronological measures of 
these dispensations. — the period of " seven times " 
shown to be the duration of the last or gentile 
dispensation, and also of the two earlier. 

THE Bible is the only book in the world that gives us a 
view of human history as a whole, that carries us from 
the lost Paradise of Eden, to the restored Paradise of the 
Apocalypse, traces the course of the human race through every 
stage of its intermediate existence on earth, and on beyond the 
limits of time, into the boundless regions of eternity. 

In it, and in it alone therefore, are we likely to find the key, 
if key there be, to the periodicity of history, — the underlying 
principle bringing the labyrinth of inharmonious periods and 
chronological irregularities which the annals of the human race 
at first sight present, into harmony with each other, and with 
the periods of nature and revealed religion. 

The histories of Scripture reach back to the farthest past, 
and its prophecies extend to the most distant future; taken 
together, as they are presented in the Bible, the two afford a 
panoramic view of the whole course of events, from the crea- 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 285 

tion and fall of man, to the final judgment, and the inaugura- 
tion of the new heavens and the new earth. 

The Bible is therefore the chart of all history, and it gives 
us, not events only, but their moral character, tracing the 
motives that influenced the various actors in the drama, as well 
as the results of their action. Events are shown in-connection 
with their causes and their effects, and the judgment of God 
as to their character is revealed. Without the Bible, history 
would be a spectacle of "rivers flowing from unknown sources, 
to unknown seas ; " but under its guidance we can trace the 
complex currents to their springs, and see the end, from the 
beginning. 

The entire story of mankind as presented in Scripture being 
composed of two parts, the historic and the prophetic, it is 
clear that the periods into which the history of man as a whole 
is divided, cannot be discerned, without taking both historic 
and prophetic chronology into account, and as both are subjects 
on which different views have been entertained, our examina- 
tion of the periodicity of human history as a whole, must be 
preceded by a careful though necessarily brief investigation, of 
the questions connected with these controverted points. 

1. What, according to Scripture, is the age of the human 
race ? in other words, — how long is it since the creation ? 

2. What periods are intended by the expressions of time 
used in Daniel and the Apocalypse in defining the duration of 
events which were future when predicted by these prophets ? 

These questions we must now therefore consider, taking 
first that of 

Old Testament Chronology. 

The highest point of antiquity to which authentic profane 
history carries us, is the occupation of Babylon by an army of 
Medes in 2233 B.C., that is about 250 years after the flood.* 

For our knowledge of the dates and durations of all previous 

* "Fasti Hcllenici " : Clinton, p. 296. 



286 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

events, we are indebted exclusively to the Hebrew Scriptures, 
and very full and explicit are the chronological data of this 
remote period, which the Bible supplies. " The history con- 
tained in the Hebrew Scriptures presents a remarkable and 
pleasing contrast to the early accounts of the Greeks. In the 
latter, we trace with difficulty a few obscure facts, preserved to 
us by the poets, who transmitted, with all the embellishments 
of poetry and fable, what they had received from oral tradition. 
In the annals of the Hebrew nation, we have authentic narra- 
tives, written by cotemfioraries, under the guidance of inspira- 
tion. What they have delivered to us, comes accordingly under 
a double sanction. They were aided by Divine inspiration in 
recording facts, upon which as mere human witnesses, their 
evidence would be valid." * 

The length of the lives of the early patriarchs, often border- 
ing on a thousand years, made oral tradition a comparatively 
safe guide : but one link intervened between Adam and Noah, 
from whom the story of antediluvian events would be handed 
down in the line of Shem to Abraham and Moses. This latter, 
though not an eyewitness of many of the facts he narrated, is 
yet an authentic reporter; and in the subsequent history of 
Israel, from the Exodus to the rebuilding of the temple, the 
writers were, strictly speaking, witnesses. 

The chronology of the Pentateuch is gathered, not from dates, 
as in ordinary history, but from accurate genealogical records • 
it is measured and marked out, not by centuries, but by gener- 
ations. The brief chronology of the antediluvian world, is all 
contained in the fifth of Genesis ; the age of the human race 
at the time of the flood, that is to say, the interval that had 
elapsed between the creation and the deluge, is ascertained 
by adding together the ages of the patriarchs at the birth of 
the sons, in whom the line from Adam to Noah is traced. 
These were not invariably the eldest sons ; Seth, the second 
link in the chain, was we know the third son of Adam, and the 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 287 

figures given make it very improbable that either Enos, Enoch, 
or Lamech, were eldest sons. Younger sons, are often 
throughout Scripture the heirs of promise, as witness Shem 
and Abram, Jacob, and Judah, David, and Solomon. " That 
was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural." Bar- 
ren wives caused to become joyful mothers, and younger sons 
chosen to be heirs of promise, often intimated in the older 
economy, that purpose of God unfolded in the New, to bring 
life out of death, and to substitute for the first and natural 
order of things, a second and spiritual order ; to replace by a 
new creation, under the headship of a second Adam — the Lord 
from heaven — that creation which fell in the first Adam. 

An examination of the fifth of Genesis will show that the 
flood, dating from the creation, took place in the year 1656 
a.m., which was the 600th year of Noah's life.* 

The correctness of this date however, as well as of that of 
the birth of Abram (which is derived in a similar way from the 
postdiluvian generations), has been called in question, because 
there exist important variations between the Hebrew Bible, and 
some of its most ancient versions, as regards these very genea- 
logical statements. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint 
version into Greek, some other ancient translations, and the 
writings of Josephus, make many of the generations, both before 
and after the flood, longer than they are represented in the 
Hebrew Scriptures, and in our authorized version which follows 
the Hebrew. Nor is the discrepancy a trivial one ; the Sep- 
tuagint places the birth of Abram, thirteen hundred years later 
than does the Hebrew Pentateuch, making the present age of 
the human family to be between seven and eight thousand 
years, instead of about six thousand years. 

It is evident therefore that in our consideration, of the 
measures of the dispensations into which human history lias 
been divided, it will not do to overlook this great chronological 
question and controversy. We must ascertain which of these 

* 130+105 + 90 + 70 + 654-162 + 654-187+182 + 600=1656. Gen. v. 



288 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

rival chronologies is the true one, since a difference bearing so 
large a proportion to the whole duration of history, must be 
material to our inquiry. 

The writings of Josephus favour the longer system ; but as 
they mainly follow the Septuagint, their evidence is not of in- 
dependent importance. The Samaritan Pentateuch has been 
proved unreliable in other respects, and cannot therefore be 
accepted as an authority on this point. The real issue lies 
between the chronology of the Hebrew Pentateuch and the 
Greek translation of it, made B.C. 280, at Alexandria in Egypt, 
by order of Ptolemy Soter, for the great Alexandrian Library. 
This ancient version, commonly called the Septuagint, or 
translation of " the seventy," was in common use among the 
Jews in our Lord's time, and was universally employed by the 
fathers of the early church, who entertained for it, an almost 
superstitious reverence, and even considered it as inspired. 
Absurd fables about its origin (the true story of which is, as 
regards its details, lost in obscurity) were invented, to give 
colour to this notion, and the reverence which existed for it 
was so great, that its chronology seems to have been gener- 
ally accepted, save by Jerome, Origen, and a few others, 
whose familiarity with the original Hebrew led them to re- 
ject it. 

Now it is especially to be noted, that the difference between 
the two, is unquestionably, from its very nature, an intentional 
alteration. It is not the effect of accident, but the result of 
deliberate design. An.enth-e century is, twelve times over, 
added to the age of the patriarch, at the time of the birth of the 
son, in whom the genealogy continues ; while the same period is 
deducted from the residue of the life, so as to leave the whole un- 
changed. The Hebrew Bible for instance states, that Adam 
was 130 years old at the birth of Seth, that he lived 800 years 
after, and died at 930. The Septuagint on the contrary gives 
him as 230 at the time of Seth's birth, says he lived only 700 
years after, but agrees that he died at 930. The following 
table presents the discrepancy both as to its nature, and as to 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 289 



Adam 


130 


Seth 


I0 5 


Enos 


90 


Cainan . 


70 


Mahalaleel 


. 65 


Enoch 


65 


Arphaxad 


35 


Salah 


3° 


Eber 


34 


Peleg 


30 


Reu 


32 


Serug 


30 



its amount ; it will be observed that it affects the lives of six 
antediluvian, and six postdiluvian patriarchs : — 

Hebrew. Septuagint. 

230 
205 
I90 
I70 
• 165 

. 165 

135 
I30 

134 
I30 
132 
I30 

Nothing but design can account for this uniform and repeated 
alteration ; it is too systematic to be the result of accident, and 
is clearly an intentional and deliberate corruption in one docu- 
ment or the other ; an increase or decrease of these periods, 
made with some ulterior object in view. 

It has been a warmly disputed point among chronologers, 
which of the two was most likely to be correct, whether the 
Jews had falsified the Hebrew, or whether the seventy Egyptian 
translators, are to be credited with having distorted in this 
manner the chronology of the Septuagint. 

Many arguments have been adduced on either side of the 
controversy, which space forbids our reproducing here. Not 
only Josephus, but most of the Fathers adopted the chronology 
of the Septuagint, as was natural, seeing it was the version with 
which they were familiar, while very few of them were acquainted 
with the Hebrew. Jerome, who made the Vulgate translation 
into Latin, however, and Origen, and some others, adhered to 
the Hebrew. The revival of learning which preceded and 
accompanied the Reformation, led to a more extensive use of 
the Hebrew original, and more deference was thenceforth 

U 



290 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

shown to the Hebrew chronology. Archbishop Usher's great 
chronological work, published in the middle of the seventeenth 
century, recognised the Hebrew dates as the true; in 1834 the 
profoundly learned work of Mr. Fynes Clinton showed that the 
judgment of this most accurate and discriminating scholar was 
in favour of the Hebrew chronology: and in 1847, Browne's 
" Ordo Saeclorum " followed, and threw its weight into the same 
scale. Thus the upholders of the Septuagint version are found 
principally among those who were unfamiliar with the Hebrew, 
and a large proportion, if not the majority of those who have 
most fully examined and compared the two, believe the Hebrew 
to be the true text. 

But common sense without learning seems almost sufficient 
to settle the question. The Hebrew is the original, and dates 
from the time of Moses ; the Septuagint is a mere Egyptian 
translation, dating from B.C. 286. Which is most likely to be 
correct ? 

The Jews held their own sacred writings in profound and in- 
deed superstitious veneration ; they worshipped the letter, and 
would have been the last people in the world to tamper with it. 
The Egyptians had no such reverence for the Old Testament, 
and would not have hesitated to corrupt the text, supposing any 
sufficient motive made the doing so seem desirable. 

It is hard to assign any motive which could have induced 
the Jews to alter the genealogies of their Pentateuch. It has 
been suggested indeed that they did so in the hope of invali- 
dating the claims of Jesus of Nazareth to be their Messiah. 
But such a change in the chronology of their early history could 
in no wise have done this. Had it been possible for them to 
have lengthened or shortened the chronology of the period 
between their restoration from Babylon, and the first advent, 
such a step would indeed have had an important bearing on 
the question. But to prolong the days before the birth of 
Abraham, could apparently serve no such purpose. 

On the other hand it is by no means difficult to conjecture 
why its Egyptian authors, whether Jewish or Gentile, may have 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 291 

falsified the original, which by the king's command they were 
to reproduce in Greek. " The Chaldeans and Egyptians, 
whose histories were about that time published by Berosus 
and Manetho, laid claim to a remote antiquity. Hence the 
translators of the Pentateuch might be led to augment the 
amount of the generations, by the centenary additions, and by 
the interpolation of a second Cainan, in order to carry back 
the epoch of the creation and the flood, to a period more con- 
formable with the high pretensions of the Egyptians and the 
Chaldeans.'' * 

The arguments alleged in favour of the longer chronology 
prove, when closely examined, to tell even more strongly in 
favour of the shorter ; and it must be remembered that while 
differing from the Hebrew as to the age of the patriarchs, at 
the birth of their sons, the Septuagint agrees with it, as to the 
age ultimately attained by each; a strong confirmation of 
the authentic character of the chronology of the Pentateuch. 
There is no valid reason for assuming that the inspired original 
has been corrupted, and that the Greek translation deserves 
more confidence. On the contrary the former must be regarded 
as possessing on every ground the strongest claim to our belief, 
and the chronology given in our authorized version, may be 
relied on as correct. 

There is no other disputed point in Biblical chronology that 
involves any material difference, or renders questionable any 
considerable interval. The whole period from Adam to Christ 
may be traced step by step from Scripture statements. We 
meet indeed two breaks in the chain, two brief chasms, which 
no ingenuity can bridge over. They have been allowed to 
occur in the wisdom of God, for some good and sufficient 
reason, and the result is that it is impossible for any one to 
accurately ascertain to within a few years, the age of the world, 
the exact period that has elapsed since the creation of Adam. 

1. We are not informed what was the duration of the govern- 

* " Fasti Hellenici " : Clinton, p. 297. 



292 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

ment of Joshua and the elders, and of the interregnum or 
anarchy which followed. The interval between the death of 
Moses and servitude under the Midianites, can from Scripture 
statements be calculated with tolerable certainty, but not with 
actual precision. The years assigned to it must rest more or 
less on conjecture, not on testimony ; it is the period spoken 
of in Josh. xxiv. 31. " Israel served the Lord all the days of 
Joshua, and all the days of the elders that overlived Joshua, 
which had known all the works of the Lord that He had done 
for Israel." Joshua was probably about the same age as 
Caleb, forty at the time of the spies ; he wandered with Israel 
in the wilderness for thirty-eight years subsequently, before he 
took command of their armies on the death of Moses. He was 
therefore about seventy-eight when his government began, and 
he was no at his death (Josh. xxiv. 29), so that the above ex- 
pression, " all the days of Joshua," must apparently include 
about thirty-two years ; it is impossible to fix the period more 
closely, and it may well vary ten years in either direction. 
Clinton puts it at twenty-seven years. 

2. The second chasm occurs between the death of Samson, 
and the election of Saul, and was occupied by the governments 
of Eli and Samuel. Josephus makes this interval fifty-two years. 
Clinton, for reasons which appear satisfactory, considers that 
the nearest approximation to the truth which scripture state- 
ments permit, is thirty-two years.* 

We have not space to enlarge on the point, as our object in 
alluding here to these chronological chasms, is less to investi- 
gate their limits, than to show that those limits are very narrow. 
From forty to sixty years comprises, in all probability, the 
range of the uncertain, in the whole extent of Bible chronology. 
The various statements of Scripture given in the subjoined table 
leave little doubt that the creation took place about 4138 B.C. 
instead of 4004, as is commonly supposed, f But any attempt 

* " Fasti Hellenici," pp. 304-320. 

t The appended table is from Elliott's " Horse ApocalypticEe," brought 
down to the present date, 1878. 



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THE SCRIPTURE CHRONOLOGY OF THE WORLD. 



I 


Creation of Adam 


I 3° 


Seth born 


23S 


Enos born 


325 


Cainan born . 


393 


Mahalaleel born 


460 


Jared born 


622 


Enoch born 


687 


Methuselah born 


874 


Lamech born . 


1056 


Noah born 


1656 


The Flood 


1658 


Arphaxad born 


1693 


Salah born 


1723 


Eber born 


1757 


Peleg born 


1787 


Reu born . 


18 19 


Serug born 


1849 


Nahor born 


1878 


Terah born 



to the birth of Seth 



. 130 years. Gen. v. 3, 



• 1 


Enos • 


105 




Cainan . 


90 


,, ,, 


Mahalaleel . 


70 




Jared . 


65 




Enoch 


162 


>> II 


Methuselah. 


6S 


.1 .. 


Lamech 


187 


I, 


Noah . 


182 


to the Flood 




600 


to the birth of Arphaxad . 


2 


11 


Salah . 


35 




Eber . 


3° 


„ 


Peleg . 


34 


11 11 


Reu . 


3° 


■ 1 i> 


Serug . 


32 


• ■ 11 


Nahor . 


3° 




Terah . 


29 


to his death 




205 



2083 The Covenant made with Abram to the giving of the Law 430 



2513 
2314 



The Giving of the Law . to the return of the Spies . 

The promise to Caleb on the return of the Spies to the 

division of the Land 



2559 The division of the Land . to Samuel the Prophet 



Saul anointed 



to the death of Saul 



3049 David began to reign 


to his death 


3089 Solomon ditto . 


ditto . 


3129 Rehoboam ditto 


ditto . 


3146 Abijah ditto 


ditto . 


3149 Asa ditto 


ditto . 


3190 Jehoshaphat ditto 


ditto . 


3213 Jehoram ditto 


ditto . 


3223 Ahaziah ditto 


ditto . 


""21-, \*h?,}i?.hl? J'S'JIinp.Hon 


to. her death 


3230 Joash began to reign 


to his death 


3270 Amaziah ditto 


ditto . 


3299 Uzziah ditto 


ditto . 


3351 Jotham ditto 


ditto . 


3367 Ahaz ditto 


ditto . 


3383 Hezekiah ditto 


ditto . 


3412 Manasseh ditto 


ditto 


3467 Amon ditto 


ditto . 


3469 Josiah ditto 


ditto 


3500 Jehoahaz ditto 


to his deposition 


3500 Tehoiakim ditto 


to his death 


3511 Jehoiachin ditto 


to his deposition 


2311 Zedekiah ditto 


to the Captivity 


3522 The Captivity . 


to the proclamation 


3592 The Decree of Cyrus 


to the birth of Chris 


4128* The Christian sera . 


to the present year 



— v. 


8S. 


— v.28 


,29. 


— vii. 


6. 


— xi. 


10. 


XI. 


12. 


— XI. 


14. 


— xi. 


16. 


XI. 


18. 



Adam lived 130 years, and begat a son, . . . and 
called his name Seth." 
v. 6. " Seth lived 105 years, and begat Enos." 
v. 9. " Enos lived 90 years, and begat Cainan." 
v. 12. " Cainan lived 70 years, and begat Mahalaleel." 
v. 15. " Mahalaleel lived 65 years, and begat Jared." 
v. 18. "Jared lived 162 years, and begat Enoch." 
v. 21. " Enoch lived 65 years, and begat Methuselah." 

" Methuselah lived 187 years, and begat Lamech." 
"Lamech lived 182 years, and begat a son, and he 

called his name Noah." 
" Noah was 600 years old when the flood of waters 

was upon the earth." 
" Shem begat Arphaxad 2 years after the Flood." 
" Arphaxad lived 35 years, and begat Salah." 
" Salah lived 30 years, and begat Eber." 
" Eber lived 34 years, and begat Peleg." 
" Peleg lived 30 years, and begat Reu." 

— xi. 20. " Reu lived 32 years, and begat Serug." 

— xi. 22. " Serug lived 30 years, and begat Nahor." 

— xi. 24. " Nahor lived 29 years, and begat Terah." 

— xi. 32. "The days of Terah were 205 years: and Terah 

died." (xii. 1.) " Now the Lord," &c. 
Gal. iii. 17. "The Covenant ... the Law, which was 430 

years after, cannot disannul." 
Num. x. n. (Compare Exod. xix. 1.) 
Josh. xiv. 10. "These 45 years, ever since the Lord spake this 

word unto Moses." 
Acts xiii. 20. "After that, He gave unto them Judges, about the 

space of 450 years, until Samuel." 

— xiii. 21. "Afterward . . . God gave unto them Saul . . . 

by the space of 40 years." 
: Kings ii. 11. "The days that David reigned over all Israel were 

40 years." 
>.Chr. ix. 30. "Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel 40 

years." 

— xii. 13. " He reigned 17 years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 3 years in Jerusalem." 
' Asa . . . died in the 41st year of his reign." 
" He reigned 25 years in Jerusalem." 
' He reigned in Jerusalem 8 years." 
' He reigned 1 year in Jerusalem." 
' He (Joash) was with them hid in the house of God 

" He reigned 40 years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 29 years in Jerusalem. " 
" He reigned 52 years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 16 years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 16 years in Jerusalem." 
"He reigned 29 years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 55 years in Jerusalem." 
" (Amon) reigned 2 years in Jerusalem." 
"He reigned in Jerusalem 31 years." 
" He reigned 3 months in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned n years in Jerusalem." 
" He reigned 3 months and 10 days in Jerusalem." 
" (Zedekiah) reigned n years in Jerusalem." 
Jer. xxv. 11. " These nations shall serve the king of Babylon 70 

years." (See 2 Chron. xxxvi. 22.) 
I According to the commonly received chronology. 



3 .. 


— xiii. 2. 


41 ,, 


— xvi. 13. 


25 .. 


— xx. 31. 


8 „ 


— xxi. 20. 


1 >• 


— xxii. 2. 


6 „ 


— xxii. 12, 


40 , 


, — xxiv. 1. 


29 . 


— xxv. 1. 


52 - 


— xxvi. 3. 


16 , 


— xxvii. 1. 


16 , 


— xxviii. 1. 


29 . 


— xxix. 1. 


55 . 


— xxxiii. 1. 




— xxxiii. 21. 


31 


, — xxxiv. 1. 





, — xxxvi. 2. 


11 > 


— xxxvi. 5. 


, 


— xxxvi. 9. 


11 


— xxxvi. 11. 



6006 The present year a.d. 1878. 



6006 years, since the Creation of man. 



To face page 39* 



The date of the Nativity, according to Clir 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 



293 



to fix with greater accuracy than this, the actual age of the 
world, is futile, as no scriptural data exist by which the precise 
year of the creation can be ascertained.* 

We accept then as about the nearest possible approach to 
truth, and as probably a very near approach indeed, the follow- 
ing dates given by Mr. Fynes Clinton : — 



Deluge 


. 1656 A.M 


Birth of Abram 


2008 


Call of Abram 


. 2083 


Exodus 


• 2513 


Death of Moses .... 


• 2553 


First servitude 


. [2580] 


Death of Eli 


. [3010] 


Election of Saul .... 


. [3042] 


Accession of David .... 


. [3082] 


Solomon 


. [3122] 


Rehoboam ..... 


. [3162] 


Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem 
Temple burnt .... 


' }[3552] 


The Nativity 


. [4133] 



Prophetic Chronology. 

We turn now from the past to the future, to gather from the 
inspired Word of God, its prophetic revelations of the chrono- 
logy of the closing events of the history of the world. 

From the earliest days, statements of time have been an 
important element in Divine predictions. The hundred and 
twenty years that should elapse before the flood, the four 
hundred years' affliction of Abraham's seed, the forty years 



* It is interesting to note that Cuvier asserts that "one of the most cer- 
tain, though least expected results, of sound geological pursuits, is the 
opinion that the last revolution which disturbed the surface of the globe is 
not very ancient ; and the date cannot go back much farther than five or 
six thousand years." " The Chinese date for the Deluge is a.m. 17 13, and 
for the seven years' famine in the days of Joseph, B.C. 1729." — See Elliott, 
vol. iv. p. 236, 237. 



294 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

in the wilderness, the seventy years of the Babylonish capti- 
vity, all these and many other periods were announced before- 
hand to Israel. And similarly in the New Testament, the 
Lord Jesus Christ foretold the period during which He would 
bow to the power of the grave, saying "the third day He 
shall rise again." These and other predictions, given simply 
to reveal the future, are accompanied by plain, literal, state- 
ments of time, such as those just quoted. But there is, as we 
have seen, another series of predictions, in which a double 
object may be distinctly traced, to reveal and yet to conceal the 
future. 

The glory of God is declared by every prophecy. His fore- 
knowledge is one of his highest attributes. His people are 
comforted, and their faith is strengthened, when they find, that 
the experiences through which they are passing, the troubles 
that are befalling them, or the difficulties that they encoun- 
ter, have been foreseen and foretold by their God. But there 
are some things which it is better for God's people not to 
know beforehand ; as for instance the true length of the 
present period of the absence of Christ from his church. 
Divine wisdom and love judged it best, as we have seen 
to conceal from the early church the foreordained duration of 
this Christian age, and to allow every generation of Christians 
to live in the expectation of the speedy return of their Lord. 
" Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of 
the world.'"' He of course knew that over eighteen centuries 
would elapse before the second coming of Christ, and could 
very easily have revealed this in plain words to the church. 
He did not do so, as is proved by the fact that the early 
generations of Christians expected the return of Christ in their 
own day. If then God, for the guidance of his people espe- 
cially during its later stages, wished to reveal the events of this 
period, without revealing its duration, He must needs adopt 
a style of prediction, which would reveal while concealing, 
and conceal while revealing, the truth. 

This is exactly what He has done. The revelations granted 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 295 

to Daniel and John, relating to the events of this dispensation, 
are not couched in ordinary language, or made in plain terms, 
which admit of no second meaning. They are embodied in 
mysterious symbolic forms, which require to be translated 
before they can be understood. They are not incompre- 
hensible ; very far from that ! Incomprehensible prophecy 
could answer no conceivable object. But prophecy which 
would be obscure for a time, and clear only after the lapse of 
ages, would answer the object supposed above, of concealing 
from one generation that which it would not be desirable for 
it to know, while revealing it to a succeeding one, to which the 
knowledge was indispensable. Now as statements of time 
occur, in connection with these symbolic prophecies, as well 
as in connection with plain predictions, the question arises, 
are these statements to be taken, in a literal, or in a figurative 
sense ? Does a day mean a day, or does it in these prophecies, 
mean a year ? Does a year mean a year, or does it mean 360 
years. Does " a thousand two hundred and threescore days " 
mean a period of three and a half years, or does it mean a 
period of 1260 of our years ? 

It is evident that a consideration of the periodicity of history 
in its widest extent, including the revealed future of man, as 
well as his fast, requires a previous investigation of this question, 
since it is necessarily vital to the subject. Before we can dis- 
cern their mutual proportions and relations, we must understand 
what all the periods with which we have to deal, really are. 
We must no more omit future periods than past ones, and 
must know the true length of the former, as well as of the 
latter. We must take all the portions of the dissected map 
into account, before we can even form a hypothesis as to its 
true configuration and dimensions, or discern the plan on 
which it has been divided. We must bear in mind for instance 
not only that the patriarchal and Jewish ages have preceded our 
own, but that Scripture foretells a millennial age to succeed it. 
We must be aware not merely that the Babylonish captivity 
lasted seventy years, but that the dominion of a certain power 



296 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

symbolised by " the little horn" was fixed at "time times and 
half a time," and we must know what period is meant by this 
strange unusual description. In a word, we must not only take 
into account the prophecies of Daniel and John, but we must 
seek by patient investigation to ascertain the sense in which 
their chronological statements are to be understood. 

A moment's reflection will show the great importance of this 
investigation, not only to our present subject, but to a right 
understanding of the prophecies themselves. 

The duration assigned tc the events and powers represented 
by these symbols, must evidently determine to a large extent, 
our opinion as to what the symbols themselves signify. The 
"little horn " is to exercise dominion for lc time times and the 
dividing of time," three years and a half. Now if this be literal 
years, the power predicted may be an individual, a personal 
Antichrist, as the Futurists assert ; but if on the other hand, it 
be symbolic language, signifying a period extending over twelve 
centuries, then the power predicted must needs be some 
dynasty of rulers, some succession of potentates, seeing no 
one man could live during so long a period. The chronology 
of these prophecies once made clear, research into their mean- 
ing becomes comparatively simple. On every account then 
the subject demands the earnest attention of those who desire 
to understand the oracles of God ; and even if it be not so 
attractive as some others, it must not be lightly passed over. 
We may say of it. what Mr. Birks says of his exposition of the 
two later visions of Daniel, " from the nature of the details of 
which it is composed, it may perhaps fail to interest general 
readers. But those who study it will find themselves repaid by 
a more deep and lively sense than ever, of the actual Provi- 
dence of the Almighty in this fallen world. Why have we, 
in the word of God itself, so many genealogies and lists of 
names, of offerings of princes, of journeys in the wilderness, 
and other passages, that seem dry and barren, but to teach 
us, that we must stoop to details and individual names, if we 
would rightly understand the condescension of our God, and 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 297 

the reality of his special oversight of the children of men ? 
Those who are soon weary of these details, must pay the cost 
of their own impatient spirit, by a more loose, unreal and 
slippery faith. The tree of faith must throw out ten thou- 
sand little roots, into the lowly soil of prophetic history, if it is 
to grow and expand into that noble confidence of hope, which 110 
storms of temptation can uproot or destroy." Here we have to 
deal with numbers and periods instead of with names, but 
these are perhaps even more unattractive to most people, as 
involving the mental effort of calculation ; but we venture to 
assert that those who take the trouble to follow the investiga- 
tion of this chapter, Bible in hand, will not fail to be at the 
close more profoundly convinced than ever before, of the 
inspiration of the sacred volume, of the all-embracing provi- 
dence and foreknowledge of God, and of the near approach of 
the "end of the age." 

On the judgment which we form as to the true meaning of 
the statements of time in symbolic chronological prophecy, 
depends also, we believe, to a great extent, the liveliness of our 
expectation of the Lord's speedy return. "That entire rejec- 
tion of prophetic chronology which follows of course, on the 
denial of the year-day system of interpretation, is most of all 
to be deplored from its deadly and paralysing influence on the 
great hope of the church. No delusion can be greater than to 
expect, by excluding all reference to times and dates, to awaken 
Christians to a more lively expectation of their Lord's second 
coming. For in truth without reference to such dates, in an 
open or disguised form, not one solid reason can be given, why 
the church may not still have to wait two or three thousand 
years, before the promise is fulfilled. The declaration 'the 
time is at hand,' was true and pertinent when the event was 
eighteen centuries removed. It and similar general promises, 
form no barrier to the supposition, that eighteen centuries 
more may still have to intervene. Every sign of the times, is 
either too vague to direct us, or in proportion as it becomes 
distinct, assumes practically all the characters of a numerical 



298 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

date, and becomes exposed to the same objections. The pro- 
phetic times indeed, when separated from the context, and 
viewed in themselves only, are a dry and worthless skeleton, 
but when taken in connection with the related events, clothed 
with historical facts, and joined with those spiritual affections, 
which should attend the study of God's providence, like the 
bones in the human frame, they give strength to what was 
feeble, and union to what was disjointed, and form and beauty 
and order, to the whole outline and substance of these sacred 
and Divine prophecies." * 

The questions, then, which we have to investigate are these. 
How are we to understand the statements of times and periods, 
which occur in the visions of Daniel and John? Are we 
to take them as literal, or as symbolic ? And if the latter, on 
what principle are we to translate them into plain language ? 
Is there a key to the hieroglyphic numbers ? and if so, what is 
it ? It must be borne in mind we are not speaking of prophetic 
numbers and periods in general, but exclusively of those which 
occur in the above named books, and which relate mainly to 
the events of this dispensation. 

The times and periods in question are the following : — 

In Daniel. 

i. That of the domination of the " little horn " 

2. That of the desolation of the " sanctuary " . 

3. The interval between the restoration from 

Babylon, and " Messiah the Prince " 

4. Time, times, and a half .... 

5. A period of 1290 days .... 

6. A period of 1335 days . 

In the Apocalypse 

1. The ten days' tribulation of the church at Smyrna, Rev. ii. 10. 

2. The duration of the scorpion torment . . „ ix. 5, 

* "Elements of Sacred Prophecy" : Birks, p. 415, 



Dan. vii. 


24. 


„ vm. 


8. 


„ ix. 


24. 


„ Xll. 


5»9- 


a » 


n. 


i> f> 


12. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 299 

3. The career of the Euphratean horsemen . Rev. ix. 15. 

4. The time of the down-treading of the Holy City „ xi. 2. 

5. That of the prophesying of the two witnesses „ „ 3. 

6. The time they lay unburied . . . „ „ 9. 

7. The sojourn of the woman in the wilderness „xii. 6, 14. 

8. The period of the domination of the beast . „ xiii. 6. 

We believe that in all the above fourteen instances, the 
period of time mentioned is a symbol of another and a larger 
period, and we now proceed to give our reasons for this 
opinion. 

If a geographer wish to represent the entire surface of our 
globe, on a sheet of paper, it is clear that he must do so on a 
miniature scale, and that the difference between the reality and 
the miniature must be enormous. He fixes his scale, 100 or 
1000 miles to an inch, as the case may be, and if his delinea- 
tion is to be correct, to that scale he must adhere throughout. 
He must not reduce the latitude a little and the longitude 
more, or diminish the seas in one proportion and the conti- 
nents in another; such a proceeding would destroy all the 
resemblance and utility of a map. If the drawing were a por- 
trait, it would produce still more incongruous results. What 
possible resemblance to the original could be traced in a por- 
trait, which should reduce to miniature all the features but one, 
and leave that one life-size ? All must be reduced, or enlarged, 
in proportion. 

The ancients in their hieroglyphic delineations observed this 
law of proportionate reduction. These were in fact miniature 
representations of the events and characters of history, and a 
certain uniform scale was adhered to in every hieroglyphic record. 
Apparent violations of the law of proportion, are in reality, the 
contrary. When for instance we see a Pharaoh represented as 
ten times as big as the slaves or captives in his train, it is still 
a proportionate representation,, because the idea to be con- 
veyed by the hieroglyph is not the literal size of the individual, 
but his relative social importance. Pharaoh was ten times more 



3oo DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

important than his slaves, a ten times greater man, in that 
sense. 

Now the symbolic prophecies of Daniel and John are of 
this character, they are verbal descriptions of hieroglyphs seen by 
the prophet ; and these hieroglyphs were themselves, divinely 
designed miniature representations of future events. We read, 
the description of what Daniel and John saw ; and they saw, 
not certain events (as the rise and fall of empires), but minia- 
ture symbols or hieroglyphs of certain events. These were 
exhibited to them, by Him who knows the end from the begin- 
ning, and who wished to reveal to them and to others through 
them, long series of great events, to happen in ages to come 
on a wide theatre, and to interest and affect the entire human 
race. For obvious reasons, this had to be done in a very 
narrow compass, and in a mysterious though comprehensible 
form ; a form which " the wise " only should understand, and 
that only after the lapse of ages. To do it, while observing 
these conditions, Divine wisdom selected as the most suitable 
medium, the universal language of symbols, the language that 
needs no intervention of sounds to make it significant; the 
language that represents ideas not words ; things not their 
names, which appeals to the eye rather than to the ear, and 
which is equally comprehensible by every nation, people and 
tongue. As these hieroglyphs are historic, chronology is 
necessarily one of their most important features, and as dura- 
tion cannot be expressed by symbolic devices, the time of the 
vision is given in words. 

Now would it not be to impeach Divine wisdom, to suppose 
that God has, in these miniature symbols, violated the laws of 
proportionate reduction, in a way which the feeble intelligence 
of his creatures would forbid them to do ? To suppose that He 
who endows the architect and the artist with wisdom to make 
their drawings to scale, has Himself adhered to no scale, and 
that without giving us any intimation of the fact, He has in 
these symbols, presented some features in miniature, and some 
as large as life ? These prophetic hieroglyphs are from God, 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 301 

they are therefore perfect ; they are miniatures ; every feature 
is therefore on a reduced scale, and among the rest, their 
chronology. 

The chronological emblem has to be conveyed to the mind 
through the ear, instead of like the rest, through the eye ; a 
beast may image an empire ; a horn may represent a dynasty, 
but on the duration of the empire or the dynasty, these sym- 
bols give no light. 

It requires words to express a period of time, but the period 
so expressed, may be as much a symbol of some other period, 
as the beast or the horn are symbols of some other thing. The 
reality of Antichrist was for wise reasons, veiled for a time, 
under the symbol of the '* little horn, 5 ' the reality of the dura- 
tion of his dominion, was for the same reasons veiled under 
the symbol of " time, times, and the dividing of time." We 
have to compare Scripture with Scripture, and Scripture with 
history, to learn the meaning of the "little horn," and we 
must do the same to learn the meaning of the " time, times, 
and a half," for the one is as symbolic as the other. 

The next question is, on what scale are these hieroglyphs 
constructed ? What for instance is the proportion between the 
Sripiov or wild beast of Dan. vii. 7, and the Roman Empire, of 
which it is the universally acknowledged symbol ? 

Evidently the reduction is on as enormous a scale as when 
our world is represented by a globe a foot in diameter. Rea- 
son then compels us to conclude that in the chronology of the 
wild beast, an equally enormous reduction will be found. Other- 
wise there would exist on the face of this prophecy, that incon- 
gruous mixture of some miniature and some life-sized features, 
that we dare not attribute to inspiration. The statement of 
time must, like the prophecy in which it occurs, be a symbolic 
miniature, intended to convey a reality immensely greater than 
itself. We do not assert that the words in which these statements 
of time are made, are symbolic : that a " day " means anything 
but a day, or a "year," anything but a year, but that the ideas 
of time conveyed to the mind, by these words, are symbols, in- 



302 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

tended to suggest other ideas of time, just as much as the ideas 
conveyed by the other parts of the hieroglyphs, are intended 
to suggest something different from themselves. 

If this be granted, the next question is, does Scripture pre- 
scribe any scale by which these miniature numbers are to be 
enlarged ? For in order to be of any use, chronological reve- 
lations must be accurate. If we desire to ascertain from a 
map the distance between any two given points, we take the 
apparent space in a pair of compasses, and measuring it 
against the scale at the side of the map, we perceive the actual 
distance. So with a chart of history, every inch may represent 
a century, and be divided into a hundred parts to represent 
years. A short line of definite length, then accurately ex- 
presses the duration of an empire, or the life of an individual, 
because we can compare the length of that line with the scale, 
and thus learn the real period. Without such a scale or key, 
map and chart would be equally useless, the one would give us 
no idea of actual dimension or distance, nor would the other 
inform us, as to actual duration. 

The above named prophetic periods, are, it will be observed, 
described under the five main divisions of time, "hours," 
"days," "weeks," "months," and "years." There are men- 
tioned 3 \ days, 10 days, 1260 days, and 1335 days: a half- 
week, a week, seven weeks, sixty-two weeks, and seventy 
weeks ; five months and forty-two months ; a " day, month, 
and year," and " time, times, and a half." 

It is evident that in order to be intelligible, these measures 
of time must all be interpreted on one scale. What scale is it ? 
Is it the grand Divine scale of " one day is with the Lord as a 
thousand years"? or is it an hour for a day? or a day for a 
month ? or day for a year ? or what is it ? 

The great answer to this important query is found in the 
fact, that one of these periods has been fulfilled, and therefore 
supplies the key to all the rest. The seventy weeks cf 
Daniel ix. elapsed between the decree of Artaxerxes, and the 
advent of Messiah. That period was actually 490 years, the 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 303 

prophecy announced it as 490 days, or " seventy weeks," and 
we are therefore led to conclude, that in all the above analo- 
gous passages, where time is predicted in miniature and in 
mystery, in harmony with the miniature and mysterious nature 
of the symbols by which the prophecy is conveyed, a year is 
represented by a day, seven years by a week, thirty years by 
a month, 360 years by a "year," and so on. 

This principle once admitted, the chronology of these pro- 
phecies becomes simple and accurate, and available for our 
present study of the periodicity of human history. The plan 
of times and seasons governing both past and future events is 
seen to be perfect, and marvellous in its comprehensiveness \ 
in its harmony with other Scripture and with nature ; and in its 
significance. 

But if this system be rejected, the chronology of prophecy 
becomes a strangely unmeaning thing, and these magnificent 
harmonies entirely disappear. Chaos reigns where order 
reigned, and we look in vain for indications of Divine wis- 
dom, in the plan of the ordering of the ages. 

And yet, strange to say, this natural, simple, scriptural, 
" year-day system," of interpreting the mysterious dates con- 
nected with the symbolic prophecies, has been strongly op- 
posed by Futurists, who maintain that statements of time 
should be taken as literally in Daniel and John as in 
Genesis and Exodus — be regarded as having precisely the 
same force, when connected with a mass of miniature symbols, 
as when associated with the plainest literal predictions. 

This system of interpretation originated, as we before men- 
tioned, with Ribera and other Jesuit writers, who, anxious to 
turn off from the Papacy the tremendous arguments against it, 
furnished by the application to it of the predictions of God's 
word about Antichrist, and Babylon, were driven to propose 
some alternative. They could not admit that the dynasty of 
the Popes had fulfilled the prophecies respecting the " man of 
sin," or that the Roman Catholic Church was, as the Reformers 
boldly asserted, "Babylon the great;" yet it was clear, no 



3©4 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

other power and system that had ever existed, so well answered 
the description. Lest this fact should strike the minds of men, 
they maintained that all these prophecies were still unfulfilled, 
and insisted upon the duty of literal interpretation, especially of 
the prophetic times. The fact that it has been held and taught 
by reformers and martyrs, who resisted unto blood the errors 
of Popery, and that it has been opposed by the champions of 
that corrupt and evil system, is itself a plea for the truth of the 
year-day interpretation. The solid and unanswerable argu- 
ments in its favour, adduced by the great Protestant expositors, 
gave currency to it, in spite of Jesuit opposition, and the 
system of prophetic interpretation with which it is connected, 
was soon so generally held in the Reformed Churches, as to 
be commonly known as the " Protestant " view. 

During the last half century Futurist views have however 
gained ground even among Protestants ; and in a good deal of 
current prophetic exposition, they are quietly assumed, and 
dogmatically taught to many who have never studied the 
subject, or clearly understood what the Protestant view is. 
We believe the Futurist view to be an erroneous and mis- 
chievous one; it precludes any adequate conception of the 
majestic range of the predictions of Scripture, it deprives the 
church of the guidance of Divine prophecy, as to the character 
and doom of the great Apostasy ; and of the stimulus to faith 
and hope, afforded by the true interpretation. We must there- 
fore be excused for dwelling a little more at length on the 
subject, which is not only important in itself, but fundamental 
to our present inquiry into the periodicity of history. 

An exhaustive and masterly treatise on the year-day system, 
from the pen of the Rev. T. R. Birks (Fellow of Trinity College, 
Cambridge, Professor of Moral Philosophy), appeared about 
thirty years ago, in his work entitled " First Elements of Sacred 
Prophecy," a work which it is now difficult to procure. To 
the arguments and reasoning adduced by this cautious and 
candid writer, little can be added. Every student of the pro- 
phetic word, who wishes to arrive at the truth on the subject* 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 305 

should carefully ponder this elaborate and thorough examina- 
tion of it. Recast, so as to adapt it to the present day, the 
reproduction of this work would be of immense service to the 
church. We give some extracts, and a brief summary of the 
general scope of the argument. 

" The year-day theory," says Professor Birks, " may be 
summed up in these maxims : — 

1. That the church after the ascension of Christ was in- 
tended of God to be kept in the lively expectation of his 
speedy return in glory. 

2. That in the Divine counsels a long period, of nearly two 
thousand years, was to intervene between the first and the 
second advent ; and to be marked by a dispensation of grace 
to the Gentiles. 

3. That in order to strengthen the faith and hope of the 
church under the long delay, a large part of the whole interval 
was prophetically announced, but in such a manner that its 
true length might not be understood, until its own close 
seemed to be drawing near. 

4. That in the symbolic prophecies of Daniel and St. John, 
other " times " were revealed along with this, and included 
under one common maxim of interpretation. 

5. That the periods thus figuratively revealed are exclusively 
those of Daniel and St. John, which relate to the general 
history of the church, between the time of the prophet and the 
second advent. 

6. That in these predictions each day represents a natural 
year, as in the vision of Ezekiel ; that a month denotes thirty, 
and a " time " or year, three hundred and sixty years. 

The first of these maxims is plain from the statements of 
Scripture, and the second from the actual history of the world. 
The third is, on a priori grounds, a natural and reasonable infer- 
ence from the two former, and is the true basis of the year-day 
theory viewed in its final cause. The three following present 
the theory itself under its true limits. Perhaps no simpler 
method could be suggested in which such a partial and half- 



306 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

veiled revelation could be made, than that which the Holy 
Spirit is thus supposed to adopt, resting as it does on a plain 
analogy of natural times.* 

Now the mere statement of these axioms removes at once 
several main difficulties which have been used to perplex and 
embarrass the inquiry. 

i. First it has been urged, that this larger interpretation 
of the prophetic times is inconsistent with the repeated com- 
mands of our Saviour, that the church should always be 
watching for his return. How could this be possible, it is 
asked, if it were revealed from the first, that 1260 years must 
elapse before that advent should arrive ? 

This objection disappears in a moment, when the facts and 
the hypothesis are simply compared together. The very reason 
for which the times are asserted to have been given in this un- 
usual form is, that they might not be understood too early, 
when they would have interfered with the earnestness of con- 
tinual expectation. . . . The only way to sustain this 
objection is to assume that the fact of such a revelation being 
given, made it the duty of the church to understand at once its 
true meaning. Two duties would then seem to contradict each 
other, — the obligation of continual watchfulness, and the duty 
of understanding the message, that more than twelve centuries 
would intervene before the advent. But the contradiction is 
not real . . . there could be no obligation to understand 
the times from the first. 

2. Again it has often been argued, that the mystical interpret- 
ation would compel us to lengthen the millennium to 360,000 
years. But the principle on which the theory has just now 
been founded, removes this objection also. The millennium is 
not included in that time of waiting, which made it desirable to 
conceal the times under a symbolic veil. ... It has been 

* The two great revolutions of the earth are apparently intended : the 
one on its axis occupies 24 hours, and gives rise to the " day ;" the other in 
its orbit occupies 365 days (or 360 soli-lunar reckoning), and gives rise to the 
"year." The lesser is used as a symbol of the greater. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 307 

further objected that the year-day interpretation was totally un- 
known for twelve centuries. This was a natural and necessary 
consequence of the principle on which it depends. Instead 
therefore of being a valid objection, it forms a remarkable pre- 
sumption in favour of its truth. In fact this exposition ap- 
peared first, at the very time when it must have appeared, if 
the principles on which it is founded had a real existence/'* 

As a presumption in favour of the mystical meaning of these 
dates, it must be observed, that they either occur in the midst 
of the symbols, or else " bear plain marks of a singular, un- 
common, and peculiar phraseology, or are prefaced by words 
importing concealment." In the case of several of them, the 
unit of time being left undefined, " days " is not more literal 
than "years." The fact also that they occur exclusively in 
two books of symbolical and mysterious character, suggests the 
idea, that they have a covert and mystical meaning ; especially 
when we recall the words of our Lord, " It is not for you to 
know the times and the seasons." It should also be borne in 
mind, that these dates (with the exception of the seventy weeks 
of Daniel, which has been fulfilled, on the scale of a year to 
a day) all pertain to the times of the Christian dispensation. 
Peter tells us that it was not for the prophets themselves, but 
for the Christian church that these " times " were revealed. 
(Dan. xii. ; 1 Pet. i. 10-12 ) Now the Christian dispensation 
throughout is one of antitypical realities, instead of one of types 
and shadows and symbols, and it is harmonious with its cha- 
racter to suppose, that there is a typical analogy between the 
" day " of these predictions, and the " year " of their fulfil- 
ment. 

Another strong presumption in favour of the same view 
arises, from the singular impressiveness and solemnity which 
accompanies the announcement of these periods, a special and 
almost awful solemnity, which is hard to explain, if the periods 
be the brief ones apparently suggested by the expressions used. 

* "First Elements of Sacred Prophecy": Birks, p. 311. 



308 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 



" They are not given in passing, nor as matters of subordinate 
importance ; . . . it is in connection with one of these 
dates that our Lord receives the title of ' the Wonderful Num- 
berer/ . . . The time, times and 'a half are twice re- 
vealed to Daniel, in two visions at an interval of twenty years ; 
in the second of these the words are introduced with peculiar 
solemnity. Two saints are exhibited as speakers ; one of them 
inquires the duration of the predicted wonders, the reply is 
given by our Lord Himself, with all the solemnity of a direct 
appeal to God. ' I heard the man clothed in linen, which 
was upon the waters of the river, when He lifted up his hand 
to heaven and sware by Him that liveth for ever, that it shall 
be for time and times and the dividing of a time.' No 
words could well be more expressive of deep mystery, and 
of the special importance to the church of the period thus re- 
vealed." That there was a mystery in these numbers was 
recognised in the church long before its true nature could be 
guessed. The strange and unusual adjuncts forbad expositors 
to rest in the simple literal meaning of the language employed. 
The Jews themselves supposed the time times and a half " to 
have a century for its unit, and denote three hundred and 
fifty years." 

When we turn from presumption, to direct evidence in favour 
of the year-day system, the prophecy of the seventy weeks 
occupies the first place, and is indeed by itself an almost con- 
clusive argument in its support. The only way in which its 
force can be evaded, is by saying that the word employed in 
the original (shabua) is ambiguous, meaning a hebdomad or 
seven, not necessarily of days ; that the event has shown that 
in this case it meant years, and that consequently the passage 
affords no ground for the year-day view. The answer to this 
is simple and conclusive. It is perfectly true that the ori- 
ginal word does not define the unit, and might mean seven of 
any measure of time ; but it is also a fact, that in Scripture, 
where it occurs about ten times, it is invariably used to denote 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 309 

seven days; we are therefore bound to suppose it is used in the 
same sense in Dan. ix., and thus the argument retains all its 
force. Seventy sevens of days was the symbol employed to 
denote seventy sevens of years. 

And that this important passage affords the true key to the 
scale on which all these miniature symbols ought to be en- 
larged, appears the more likely when we consider two other 
passages in which God Himself declares that He adopts this 
scale. The first is the sentence on Israel in the desert : " after 
the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even 
forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, 
even forty years." The twelve men who searched the land 
were representatives of the twelve tribes of Israel ; they were 
not symbols of them, but they were types — representatives — a 
few men representing a great many. So the forty days during 
which they searched the land, are made typical of the forty 
years, during which they should wander in the wilderness. 

Now here, it is not as in Daniel, the fulfilment which proves 
the prediction to have been on this scale ; but the scale is fixed 
and adopted by God before the event. 

And it is the same in Ezek. iv. 4, where the prophet is 
commanded to enact a type, to become himself a living em- 
blem of the house of Israel, by lying first on his left side for 
three hundred and ninety days, and then on his right side for 
forty days. Ezekiel here, like the spies before, was a type or 
representative of the nation ; his recumbent position, a type of 
their degradation and debasement by national sin, and the 
period during which he was to maintain that position, divinely 
fixed beforehand, represented the period to be completed prior 
to the end of the judgment which was to fall on that nation. 
And as Ezekiel was a small emblem of a large nation, so the 
days were a brief emblem of a long period. " I have ap- 
pointed thee a day for a year, a day for a year." In each of 
these periods a day, in the enacted prophetic type, represented 
a year in the subsequent history. When therefore in Daniel 
and the Apocalypse, we find a variety of enacted prophetic 



3io DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

symbols of subsequent history, associated with the announce- 
ment of periods in days, why should we doubt, that the same 
scale is to be applied for their enlargement and adaptation to 
the reality ? The word of God furnishes no single instance of 
the employment of any other. 

Besides these three clear Old Testament instances of the 
employment of a year-day scale, there is one New Testament 
incident, in which it is almost impossible to avoid the con- 
clusion that our Lord Jesus Christ adopts the same symbolic 
phraseology, and that for the identical reason for which it is 
employed in prophecy, — to reveal while concealing, and to 
conceal while revealing, the future. 

It is in his message to Herod, when informed by the Phari- 
sees of that monarch's intention to kill Him. " Go ye, and tell 
that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to-day and 
to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Neverthe- 
less I must walk to-day, and to-morrow, and the day following \ 
for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." 

There is a peculiar precision in this twice-repeated statement 
of time, which forbids the thought that it was a mere indefinite 
substitute for " a little longer ; " as if He had said, " I must 
continue a little longer my works of mercy." He twice over 
mentions a definite period of three days. But a much longer 
period than three literal days elapsed between the utterance of 
these words and the death and resurrection of Christ, so the 
expression cannot be taken literally. It is an admitted fact 
on the other hand, that the ministry of Christ lasted three com- 
plete years, the period which elapsed between that first pass- 
over at which He cleansed the temple at the commencement 
of his public ministry, and that fourth passover, which He eat 
with his disciples the night before He suffered. The sentence 
in question, would therefore exactly describe the appointed dura- 
tion of his ministry, on the year-day principle, and would point 
out his Divine foreknowledge of the time when He was to be 
delivered by the Jews into the hands of the Gentiles, crucified, 
and raised again, or " perfected." It was as though, hearing of 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 31 r 

Herod's crafty intentions to kill Him, He had sent him word, 
K You have no power against me, till I reach the time and the 
place predetermined for my death and resurrection. My minis- 
try must last for three years, and terminate as it began, at the 
passover at Jerusalem. " 

There are thus three plain cases in the Old Testament, and 
one scarcely less clear in the New, in which the year-day 
system is divinely employed, and we have consequently sub- 
stantial scriptural grounds on which to base it. And in addition 
to these presumptions in its favour, and to these scriptural in- 
stances of its employment, it must be observed that each of the 
above-mentioned fourteen prophetic statements of time, which 
the Protestant system interprets on this year-day scale, affords 
internal evidence when carefully examined, that it is not intended 
to be interpreted literally. 

1. The leading one — the "time, times, and dividing of a time," 
is, to begin with, a most peculiar form of expression by which 
to designate a brief period of three and a half years. " If the 
short reckoning were the true one, no reason can be given why 
the times should not be expressed in the most customary form. 
On the other hand, the year-day theory requires that a shorter 
term should be merely suggested, in such a way as to hinder 
us from resting in the typical phrase, as the true meaning. 
Now such exactly is the term before us. It doubtless suggests 
to the mind by comparison with other texts, three years and a 
half. But it is not the usual or literal expression for that period. 
Twice alone does that interval occur elsewhere (Luke vi. 25 , 
Jas. v. 17), and in both it is expressed by the natural phrase, 
three years and six months. The same is true in every similar 
case. Paul abode at Corinth " one year and six months ; ' 
(Acts xviii. n), David reigned in Hebron "seven years and 
six months " (2 Sam. ii. n). He was with the Philistines " a 
year and four months " (2 Sam. xxvii. 7). The form in which 
the periods of time are expressed, is thus invariably the same. 
And hence though three years and a half are suggested to the 
mind by this phrase, there is nothing in the words which fixes 



312 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

it to this sense. This has not in truth any more claim to be 
the literal meaning than one thousand two hundred and sixty 
years. 

2. But secondly, the fundamental term, a time, implies, rather 
than excludes, the wider sense. The natural series of words of 
time, consists of a day, a week, a month, and a year. The first 
three are retained in the prophetic calendar ; but the last of 
them is replaced by this general expression — a time — which 
takes the lead of all the others. It occurs in the first of these 
dates, and in two or rather three others on which the rest chiefly 
depend. Now this substitution could not be without meaning. 
It leaves the analogy among the different periods unbroken ; 
but at the same time, it sets loose this fundamental period, so 
as to be at liberty even by the common rules of language, to 
receive a larger signification. 

This argument becomes much stronger, when we consider 
the actual use of the same term in other passages. It is of 
frequent recurrence in the Old Testament, and is employed to 
denote periods of various lengths, and even extending to many 
years. It meets us first in the narrative of the creation : " Let 
them (the sun and moon) be for signs and for seasons" where 
it is distinguished alike from days and years. It is frequently 
used to denote the appointed time of all the feasts of the 
law. (Lev. xxiii. 2, 4, 37, 44; Num. ix. 2, 3, 7, 13 ; x, 10 ; 
xv. 3.) It is employed with regard to the fall of Pharaoh 
Hophra, and the restoration of Israel. " Pharaoh hath passed 
the time appointed 1 ' (Jer. xlvi. 17). " The time to favour Zion, 
the set time is come" (Ps. cii. 13). "The vision (of the 
coming of Christ) is yet for an appointed time" (Hab. ii. 3). 
In these and several other passages an extensive interval is 
clearly implied : and the fundamental idea is one, which has 
no respect to the length or shortness of the period, but simply 
to its fixed and determinate character. It is plain how com- 
pletely these two marks, that it is at once indefinite, and deter- 
minate, make it a suitable term to form the basis of a prophetic 
chronology, on the year-day system. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 313 

3. The different terms used to denote the same period, are a 
further proof that it cannot denote three natural years and a 
half. The same interval occurs seven times over. Twice it is 
mentioned as ' time, times, and a dividing of a time ' ; once as 
* time, times, and a half; twice as ' forty and two months'; 
and twice as ' twelve hundred and sixty days/ A comparison 
of these passages will show that they all relate to the same 
period. Yet the expression is varied in this remarkable man- 
ner, and in all these variations is never once expressed by the 
natural and literal phrase. How can we explain this remark- 
able feature, but by supposing it to indicate a mysterious and 
hidden sense ? The Holy Spirit seems in a manner to exhaust 
all the phrases by which the interval could be expressed, ex- 
cluding always that one form, which would be used of course 
in ordinary writing, and which is used invariably in Scripture 
on other occasions, to denote the literal period. The variation 
is most significant if we accept the year-day system, but quite 
inexplicable on the other view.* 

Two arguments in favour of the extended view of these dates, 
may be drawn from the history of Nebuchadnezzar's dream and 
its fulfilment, one connected with the word " times," the other 
dependent on the typical character of the monarch. 

Nebuchadnezzar beheld in vision a lofty tree, interpreted to 
denote the king himself, he heard a watcher, even a Holy one, 
proclaim a remarkable sentence on the tree, that it should be 
hewn down and stripped. " Let his heart be changed from a 
man's heart, and let a beast's heart be given unto him, and let 
seven times pass over him." This sentence on the tree, was ful- 
filled in the period of the insanity of the king, which though 
nowhere stated to have lasted seven years, is by general con- 
sent allowed to have done so. 

Now at first sight this seems to afford an argument against 
the year-day interpretation, for here " seven times " clearly 
denoted seven literal years ; on closer examination, however, it 

* Birks' " Elements of Prophecy," p. 350-352. 



314 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

will be found to do the reverse. The expression "time " does 
not, as we have seen, imply any particular period ; any definite 
season, a day, a week, a month, a year, or a century, would be 
equally well expressed by it. The conclusion that the king's 
insanity lasted seven years, is not based therefore on the force 
of the word, but on the context and the nature of the case. We 
cannot suppose that seven days, weeks, or even months, would 
have sufficed to teach the monarch the great lesson he had to 
learn and teach to others • the duration of his life excludes the 
thought that seven centuries, or seven of any longer measure 
of time, were meant, and all things considered, seven real 
years, seems the only period that can have been intended. 
But when the same expression "times" occurs in connection 
with an empire whose duration is 2000 years, every reason 
which has led us to conclude that in the case of the individual 
king it meant years of days, now leads us to conclude that in 
the case of the empire it means years of years. If an insanity 
of seven weeks would seem an event unworthy of such solemn 
prediction, or of such a prominent place in the life of an in- 
dividual, how much more so, an apostasy of three and a half 
years, in the history of an empire which extends over twenty 
centuries ! 

But Nebuchadnezzar was a typical, representative man. 
Not only was he the golden head of the great fourfold image, 
but he stands as its representative, as the representative of the 
long succession of Gentile rulers, who were to succeed him, 
till the coming of the Son of, man. The two characteristic 
marks of these Gentile rulers have been idolatry and persecution 
of God's saints • these two things are represented as character- 
izing Nebuchadnezzar. His image making, and image worship- 
ing, typified the idolatry (Pagan and Papal), which has been so 
indelibly stamped on all the four great empires; his "burning 
fiery furnace " for the faithful witnesses, typified the persecution 
which has been inflicted on the people of God, by each of the 
four great ruling empires in turn, especially by the modern 
spiritual Babylon. These two characters of idolatrous debase- 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 315 

ment and fierce cruelty, are those which render the symbol 
of wild beasts, suitable to represent these empires ; and thus 
Nebuchadnezzar too is presented as a beast; his degradation 
to a bestial condition, typified the moral degradation of the 
Gentile kingdoms, through idolatry, pride, and self- exaltation ; 
his restoration to reason, prefigured the yet future day when the 
empires of earth shall own that " the heavens do rule." Now, 
over this typical man, passed a period of insanity, which was 
doubtless equally typical, and which is the only clue we have 
to the appointed duration of the " times of the Gentiles," for 
neither in connection with the fourfold image, or with the four 
wild beasts, have we any hint of the length of this interval. 

But the image, the king himself, and the wild beasts, are 
three types of one and the same thing under different aspects ; 
and thus the duration of Nebuchadnezzar's insanity becomes 
typical of the duration of the times of the Gentiles, the times 
during which supreme power in the earth, is by God committed 
to Gentile rulers, instead of to the seed of David. Now these 
"times" have already lasted more than 2400 years since the 
days of Nebuchadnezzar, and thus we see that the seven years 
of days, during which the king was insane, were intended to pre- 
figure seven years of years (2520 years) during which the moral 
and spiritual degradation and debasement of the kingdoms of 
this world, dating from himself, are destined to endure. Now 
the oft-repeated interval of " time times and a half" "forty-two 
months" "1260 days" all refer to the second half of this period, 
and must therefore be fulfilled on the same scale as the whole 
period. They are part, not of the type, but of the antitype, and 
they must be interpreted not on the scale of the type, but on the 
scale of the antitype, that is on the scale of a day for a year. 

This inference is strengthened by one further remark. If 
the whole interval from Nebuchadnezzar's reign be divided into 
two equal portions, . . . the latter half falls exclusively 
within the times of the fourth or Roman empire, and soon after 
the time when its division into separate kingdoms was first 
completed. This is a pointed coincidence with the broader 



316 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

features of the prophecy, for in the vision also the " time times 
and a half" are all included in the period which follows after 
the ten horns have arisen. * 

The vision of Daniel viii. gives the prophetic date of two 
thousand three hundred days as the duration of the restored 
daily sacrifice, and of the subsequent desolations. 

Now if we take this literally, it makes a period of between 
six and seven years, analogous to nothing else in Scripture, and 
incomprehensible in connection with the question to which it 
is an answer. Besides, if this were the time intended it would 
have been far more natural to have described it in years than 
in days. No motive of concealment could exist, to require a 
veil of mystery ; nor indeed is any veil of mystery used, for it 
is a simple question of arithmetical reduction to resolve these 
days into years. That it is not to be taken literally, however, is 
proved by the constant usage of Scripture. Not a passage can 
be found in the Bible in which a period exceeding a year, is stated 
in days — and only two, in which a period exceeding two 
months is so mentioned (except of course those in which these 
symbolic dates occur). 

* "Elements of Prophecy" : Birks, p. 356. Mr. Elliott says on this 
subject : — 

" I do not except the ' seven times ' specified in Nebuchadnezzar's vision 
as the appointed time of the royal tree continuing cut down, from the cate- 
gory of chronological prophecies to which the year-day principle is to be 
applied. The tree itself symbolised Nebuchadnezzar, and as there was no- 
thing of a miniature scale in the symbol as compared with what it symbolised, 
the seven years might, without violation of propriety, symbolise an equal 
period of desolation to the monarch. But did he experience this extraor- 
dinary judgment and recovery simply in his individual character, or as a 
symbolic man ? . . . For my own part, considering the extraordinary 
nature of the judgment, the fact of its being so fully recorded by Daniel, the 
circumstance of Nebuchadnezzar being addressed on occasion of another pro- 
phecy, as the representative of his nation (' Thou art this head of gold'), and 
that of the symbolic tree when cut down, being bound with a band of brass 
and iron, the metals significant (in the fourfold image) of the Greek and 
Roman Empires, which did for ages hold sway over the prostrate region of 
Babylon ; all these considerations . . . induce me to believe that 
the seven times 360 days that passed over Nebuchadnezzar in his madness, 
represent the 2520 years . . . of the 'times of the Gentiles.'" (Elliott, 
u Horae," vol. iii., p. 247, foot note). 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 317 

But the word days is not used; the real form of the ex- 
pression indicates more mystery, and suggests on critical 
grounds, the idea that no unit of time is given at all, and that 
consequently "days" is no more literal than years. " Unto even- 
ings and mornings, or unto evening morning, two thousand 
three hundred." That a long period is intended appears, from 
the angel's words, " shut up the vision, for it shall be for many 
days." Now six or seven years is but a brief period in our 
estimation, how much less in an angel's ? Gabriel would not 
thus have spoken of so short an interval. But if the period 
intended were twenty-three centuries, his words have an appro- 
priate dignity. If we interpret this date on the year-day 
principle, it reaches from the time of Daniel to the future 
restoration of Israel, and is a clear and satisfactory answer to 
the double question.* It marks the duration of the restored 
daily sacrifice, and of the subsequent desolation ; the five centuries 
between Cyrus and Titus during which Jewish sacrifices were 
daily offered in the restored temple being its first portion ; while 
the second and longer portion comprehends the final destruc- 
tion of the city and temple, the treading down of Jerusalem by 
the Gentiles, and the dispersion of her people ; and stretches 
onward to the future advent when the sanctuary shall be finally 
cleansed. The period being so long, and the greater part of it 
being occupied by this gospel dispensation', its length is pur- 
posely veiled, under an enigmatical yet deeply significant form 
of expression, and was evidently not intended to be understood 
at first. " Shut thou up the vision, for it shall be for many 
days." It included a declaration of the long duration of that 
economy of grace to the Gentiles, whose occurrence at all, was 
for five hundred years afterwards, a hidden mystery. " The 
mystery which in other ages was not made known to the sons 
of men . , . that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and 
of the same body, and partakers of his promise in Christ, by 
the gospel." Here is a reason for the enigmatical form of the 

# Dan. viii. 13. 



3i8 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

chronological announcement ; they who take it literally and 
refer it to a distant future, make a mystery without a meaning. 

" The strangeness of the expression being once proved, our 
choice lies between a mystery which means nothing, and a 
mystery which has a plain and definite cause in God's provi- 
dence, and a key not less plain and definite, and three times 
repeated in God's holy word. Who would hesitate which 
alternative to choose ? " *■ 

It is the same with three dates given in Dan. xii. ; they 
form one group, the last two being merely extensions of the 
great period " time, times, and a half," and they must of course 
be interpreted on the same principle. The interval covered 
by this last prophecy (which begins with chapter xi.), clearly 
extends from the time then present, to the resurrection; it 
commences with, " Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings 
in Persia," and reaches on in unbroken sequence, to that time 
when " many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall 
awake." A solemn importance is thrown around the announce- 
ment of the times, " I heard the man clothed in linen, which 
was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right 
hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by Him that 
liveth for ever and ever, that it shall be for a time, times, and 
a half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the 
power of the holy people, ail these things shall be finished." 
Now it seems incongruous to suppose that this singularly im- 
pressive oath applies to a brief period, not one six-hundredth 
part of the whole interval revealed. 

We turn now to the book of Revelation, to discover whether 
its testimony confirms the evidence afforded by the prophecies 
of Daniel, that the principle on which these sacred dates are 
to be interpreted, is that of a year for a day. 

As to the ten days' persecution of the church at Smyrna, a 
literal fulfilment is unknown to history, though this is of course 
no proof that it did not take place. But if Smyrna be only one 



* "Elements of Prophecy " : Birks, p. 363. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 319 

phase, moral and chronological, of the whole Christian Church, 
that of the closing days of Paganism, prior to the entrance of 
gross corruption, as seems probable, the ten years of Diocle- 
tian's last great persecution, would evidently be indicated by 
the expression. The passage does not however tell strongly 
either way, though it is almost absurd to suppose that a perse- 
cution often literal days would be made a subject of prophetic 
revelation at all. 

In the case of the locust woe (Rev. ix. 5), the miniature symbol 
again demands a miniature period, and the one selected is that 
of the ordinary ravages of locusts, but it evidently requires the 
year-day system to make it commensurate with the events pre- 
dicted to take place during its course. In the case of the 
Euphratean horsemen, the very peculiarity of the phrase (Rev. 
ix. 15) suggests as before a mystic meaning. Why, if the 
period intended were literal, should an hour be mentioned at 
all? and why should the ordinary way of mentioning the 
larger period first, be completely reversed ? But an improved 
reading (given by Matthaei and found in seven or eight of the 
best manuscripts) would give the words thus, " the angels pre- 
pared for that hour and that day, were loosed both a month 
and a year," i.e., 390 days. Now this was the exact period 
during which Ezekiel was commanded to lie on his side, to 
represent the 390 years of the judgment of Israel. Mr. Birks 
truly remarks, " this has not the air of a casual resemblance ; 
it is rather an express mark supplied to us by the Holy 
Spirit, and directing us to the true key by which to interpret 
these prophetic periods." The 390 years was in each case 
marked as one of stubborn unrepenting idolatry, closed by 
decisive overthrow and judgment, and the period occurs no- 
where else in Scripture. 

The forty-two months of the treading down of the holy city 
(Rev. xi. 2), if taken literally, seems strangely unmeaning. 
Jerusalem has already been trodden down of the Gentiles 1800 
years, and it will, as we know from our Lord's own words, con- 
tinue to be so till the close of the times of the Gentiles. In 



320 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

what sense can this period be denned by "forty and two 
months " ? And why if the period designed were really as brief 
a one, as that in which the heavens were shut up by Elias 
(alluded to in the passage), why was not the same expression 
used to designate it, " three years and six months " ? 

That the " three days and a half" during which the wit- 
nesses lie unburied (Rev. xi. 9) is symbolic, is proved by the 
fact that " we have about thirty passages in Scripture where 
three days are mentioned to define an interval, and four where 
four days occur ; but nowhere else is the fraction of a day 
introduced into such a measurement of time. ... If the 
Holy Spirit had intended natural days only, would He have 
used a preciseness in the statement of time, which is nowhere 
else employed in nearly forty examples, not even in that most 
important of all facts, the resurrection of our Lord " ? * 

The previous remarks as to the congruity of miniature dates 
with miniature symbols, and as to the mystery indicated by the 
unusual phraseology, apply equally to the two chronological 
periods in Rev. xii. The sun-clad star-crowned woman is 
evidently a symbol of the true or spiritual Israel, and her 
flight into the wilderness, where she is nourished for 1260 days, 
of some period of the church's history. Now the natural 
Israel of old fled also from the persecution of a tyrant king, 
into the wilderness, where they were nourished with bread 
from heaven, and water from the rock ; and we know their 
wilderness history to have been typical to the highest degree. 
There is not a point in the type, for which we cannot perceive 
a corresponding antitype, and it is natural to expect some 
analogy in the periods of the two sojourns in the wilderness. 
Now the duration of Israel's wanderings in the desert, was un- 
questionably fixed and announced by God, on the year-day pri7i- 
ciple; " after the number of the days in which ye searched the 
land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear youi 
iniquities, even forty years." Can we escape the conviction 

* "Elements of Prophecy" : Birks, p. 380. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 321 

that the same principle is to be applied to the 1260 days here 
specified, as marking the abode of the antitypical Israel in the 
wilderness ? 

The period of the domination of " the beast " is fixed (Rev. 
xiii. 5) as " forty and two months." This is the last of the 
mystic dates we have to consider. It must be compared with 
the explanation (ch. xvii. 9-1 1) : — " The seven heads are seven 
mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven 
kings ; five have fallen, and one is, and the other is not 
yet come; and when he cometh he must continue a short 
space ; and the beast that was and is not, even he is the eighth, 
and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition." The argument 
in favour of the year-day interpretation yielded by this passage 
is of the following character : — Prior to the days of John, five 
forms of government had succeeded each other in Rome. 
These were the five fallen heads ; a sixth was then in being, a 
seventh was to follow, and occupy a short space, and the beast 
who was to continue forty and two months was to be the eighth. 
Thus the whole interval from a.d. 96, the date of the Apoca- 
lypse, to the still future destruction of the beast, is divided into 
three parts, — the remainder of the sixth head, the " short 
space " of the seventh, and the forty-two months of the eighth 
head, or " the beast/' 

Now since the first is only a remainder, and the second 
expressly predicted as short, we should naturally expect the 
third to be the longest in duration. The whole interval is 
already nearly 1800 years : how, then, is it possible to suppose 
this third to be only three years and a half? The second 
must, of course, in that case be still less, and the fractional 
first part would have to be extended over 1770 years! On 
the year-day principle all is harmonious : the forty- two months 
of the beast occupy 1260 years out of the whole period, leaving 
516 years to be divided between the fraction of the sixth, and 
the " short space " of the seventh head. 

Mr. Birks thus sums up his masterly argument, of which 
the foregoing is a mere outline : — " The year-day theory rests 



322 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

on a surprising combination of scriptural arguments, some of 
which, it is true, are indirect, and some doubtful ; but the 
great majority are full, clear, and unambiguous. First of all 
there are four or five distinct presumptions of a general kind, 
that the dates have some secret meaning. There are, then, 
three plain and certain, and one more disputable passage, 
which supply an express rule of interpretation, and a key at once 
simple and comprehensive, the direct appointment of God 
Himself. When we further proceed to examine the passages 
in detail, we find that every one, without exception, yields 
some peculiar argument, in support of this same view ; and 
several of them furnish us with two or three distinct proofs. 
And besides all these internal evidences for the system, it is 
found to have a basis in the heavenly revolutions themselves, 
and to be confirmed by its manifest harmony with the most 
exact elements of natural science." * 

Thus we have shown, 

i. That the chronology of the Hebrew Bible is our 

ONLY RELIABLE GUIDE, AS TO THE PERIODS OF REMOTE AN- 
TIQUITY ; and that the two gaps which occur in it, between the 
death of Moses, and the accession of Saul, have necessarily 
very brief limits, and cannot affect the question of the age of 
the world, to a greater extent than about fifty or sixty years. 
2. And we have proved, as far as the point admits of proof, 

THAT THE PERIODS OF SYMBOLIC CHRONOLOGICAL PROPHECY, 
ARE TO BE INTERPRETED ON THE YEAR-DAY SYSTEM. 

We are consequently in a position to consider the peri- 
odicity of history as a whole, taking into account the times 
foretold as in their day future, by Daniel and John, as well 
as those recorded as past, by other holy men of old. 

We now proceed to examine these periods, to trace their 
mutual relations, and their relations to other series of periods, 



* The meaning of this allusion will be explained in later chapters of this 
work. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 323 

and to show the Divine plan and system which underlies them, 
connecting them on the one hand with the periods of vital 
phenomena, and on the other with those of the whole mag- 
nificent solar system. 

In pursuing this investigation, it must be borne in mind that 
the great end of all human history, like the great end of the 
existence of every human being, is a moral one. Existence to 
the entire race, like life to each individual, is a state of proba- 
tion and education. The great objects of God, in his dealings 
with man from age to age, seem to have been, to reveal to him 
and to the universe, his true character and condition as a 
fallen being; while at the same time unveiling his own 
glorious, righteous, and gracious attributes, making known his 
purposes, and bringing forth his salvation. 

Ignore this moral purpose of God, and human history be- 
comes inexplicable, its chronology reducible to no system, and 
its study comparatively profitless and vain. Recognise it, and 
the whole outline and movement of the great drama, are at once 
intelligible, the plan underlying its periods is clear, and its 
study becomes fraught with lessons of the deepest and most 
solemn importance. 

The true plan of history can therefore be found only in the 
Bible. The birth of humanity, its growth and maturity, its fall 
and its restoration, are all to be best traced in the Holy Word 
of God ; and the key to its chronology and periodicity is also 
there. In vain do those who neglect the scriptures seek to 
understand aright, either man's past or his future. 

The main divisions of history which we shall now proceed 
to present, will be found therefore to have a character more 
moral and dispensation^, than political. Many of the greatest 
political events in the world's history will have to pass under 
our review, but we shall regard them as occupying a place of 
subordinate, and not of paramount importance. The central 
line, to which all political events have more or less reference, 
will be seen to be the history of the typical and of the 

ANTITYPICAL ISRAELS,— THE JEWISH NATION AND THE CHRIS- 



324 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

tian church. Bible history and prophecy range themselves 
around these, just as Bible geography ranges itself around 
Jerusalem and the Holy Land; and the reason is obvious. 

The natural and spiritual seed of Abraham are the line of 
promise, the peculiar people of God, in and through whom 
alone, mankind is to be saved and blessed. " In thee, and in 
thy seed, shall all nations of the earth be blessed." 

As in each of the realms into which we have already glanced, 
so here in the realm of history, we shall find everything 
adapted to the great Divine septiform system. In a marvel- 
lous, hidden, and intricate manner, the week measures the 
periods of history, both great and small. Patient and accurate 
attention to the statements of Scripture is needful in order to 
trace out the arrangement of its periods, for it is purposely 
disguised and concealed, so as to elude the observation of the 
superficial reader. A comprehension of the biblical system of 
times and seasons, is calculated to fill the mind with awe and 
admiration, and to draw forth fresh worship of the omniscient 
God, who orders all things after the counsel of his own will, 
and knows the end, from the beginning. 

There is, in the various particulars we shall have to pass in re- 
view, a cumulative force ; peculiarities observed in a few periods, 
or even in many, would be insufficient to prove the existence of 
plan and system, but when a vast multitude of events, and 
innumerable periods of the most various and apparently in- 
congruous dimensions, ranging in duration from hours to 
millenaries, are found to fall into order and harmony, at the 
touch of a single wand, on the application of a single principle, 
then it will surely be clear to a candid mind, that history has 
been intentionally ordered on that principle ; and when, further, 
that principle is seen to be the same that regulates the phe- 
nomena of the organic and inorganic creations, and the same 
that is consistently adopted in Holy Scripture, the conclusion is 
as inevitable, as it is elevating and sanctifying, that it is the 
Almighty Maker of all worlds, the sole Lord and Giver of life, 
the Author of the sacred volume, who so orders it, who is the 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 325 

Ruler of all events, the Disposer of all times and seasons. 
Our times are in his hands, and the times of all earthly 
empires, and kingdoms, and dynasties ; and in due time his 
own kingdom shall overthrow all other dominion, and stand 
for ever. " The vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the 
end it shall speak, and not lie ; though it tarry, wait for it, for 
it shall surely come, it shall not tarry." 

" God moves in a mysterious way, 
His wonders to perform ; 
He plants his footsteps in the sea, 
And rides upon the storm. 

Deep in unfathomable mines 

Of never-failing skill, 
He treasures up his deep designs, 

And works his sovereign will. 

His purposes will ripen fast, 

Unfolding every hour ; 
The bud may have a bitter taste, 

But sweet will be the flower." 

The grand primary division of all human history, whether 
viewed from the moral, or from the chronological stand-point, 
is into three main, comprehensive, and long-enduring dispen- 
sations. 

Scripture presents us with, — 
I. The Patriarchal Age, 
II. The Jewish Dispensation, and 

III. The " Times of the Gentiles," 
and with these great periods only, prior to the " Times of the 
Restitution of all things," or the Millennial Age. 

The limits of the first or Patriarchal Age, are defined by the 
Apostle Paul in the 5th of Romans; "death reigned from 
Adam to Moses" 

The second, or Jewish Dispensation, dating from the Divine 
act of dividing the nations of the earth, and assigning a pre- 
eminence and a sacred character to the family of S/iem, included 
the entire history of the Jewish people and their fathers, and 



326 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

extended from the re-peopling of the earth after the Flood, to 
the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, a.d. 70-71, which was 
the end of the Jewish temple, city, and polity. 

The third is distinguished by our Lord Himself as a separate 
period, under the title of "the times of the Gentiles" (Luke 
xxi. 24) ; and is the period of the duration of the empires pre-. 
figured by the great fourfold image of Nebuchadnezzar, the 
earliest, the simplest, and the most comprehensive of all the, 
symbolic prophecies. It is the great Gentile dispensation, 
during which dominion in the earth, and over Israel, is by God 
committed to Gentile powers. Speaking generally, it dates 
from the rise of the four great monarchies, and extends to the 
Second Advent of Christ to establish the " kingdom of the God 
of heaven, which shall never be destroyed." The inspired 
statements of time connected with this last, give the clue to the 
duration or chronological measurements of all three dispensa- 
tions. As distinctly intimated in Daniel, it is a great week, 
" seven times." Its latter half, is the oft-recurring " time, times, 
and a half," or 1260 years. Its whole duration is seven years of 
years ; that is, it is a week, each of whose days is a year of 360 
years : in other words, it is a period of 2520 natural years. 

Each of the two previous dispensations, has, as we shall 
presently show, a similar duration. If therefore the three were 
juxtaposed, if they had followed each other in chronological 
sequence, their united period would be between seven and 
eight thousand years. 

But this is not the case. The second takes its rise two-thirds 
down the course of the first, and the third takes its rise, hi a 
similar way, two-thirds down the course of the second, so that 
the whole period comprised in the three dispensations, is nearly 
6000 years, as will be seen by an examination of the accom- 
panying diagram. 

It will be observed that the dispensations are represented 
not d& Joined on to, but as growing out of each other. As we 
proceed, it will become obvious, that there actually exists be- 
tween them, not a mere lifeless sequence, but an intimate living 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 327 

connection, which makes this theoretically proper, as well as 
chronologically true. The relation between them is not that 
of mere mechanical juxtaposition, but that of vital ingrafting 
and growth. 

Before we enter into the chronological and historical details 
which justify these general statements, it will be well briefly 
to trace the moral features which characterize these three great 
dispensations. 

They coincide with three distinct stages of revelation of the 
character and purposes of God : they have afforded three dis- 
tinct probations to man, and they are represented in Scripture 
as closed by great judgments which display, each one with 
added clearness, God's righteous indignation against sin. 

In the first, or patriarchal age, was made known, what the 
apostle calls, " eternal power and Godhead ; " the second, or 
Jewish dispensation, revealed the righteousness and justice of 
God; its one ever-recurring refrain seeming to be, " Holy, holy, 
holy is the Lord of Hosts;" and in the third, " the kindness 
and love of God our Saviour towards man appeared," " the 
grace of God, which bringeth salvation, appeared unto all men." 
Nature, the Law, the Gospel, such have been the three stages, 
by which God has been manifested to men, and by which fallen 
humanity has been put to the test. 

Of the patriarchal age, the leading characteristic was, that 
it had "no law" (Rom. v. 13, 14). Man during its course was 
left very much to himself, that he might show what was in him. 
An immense week of probation was granted to him ; for the 
Eternal God moves slowly and majestically in his dealings with 
his fallen creatures. For twenty-five long centuries no code 
of laws was laid on men, to restrain them from evil ? or direct 
them to good. 

Yet God left not Himself during this period without a witness, 
as Paul shows in the first and second chapters of Romans. He 
laid open before the eyes of men the volume of nature ; the 
starry heavens above, and the beautiful world around, teeming 
with infinitely varied forms of life, and filled with ten thousand 



328 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

evidences of benevolent design, spoke to man of the wisdom, 
power, and goodness of his Creator. 

But man had no ears to hear its silent testimony, no eye to 
take in its expressive teachings, no heart to feel its sweet and 
melting influences. He saw indeed the sun, moon, and stars, 
he beheld them with admiration and awe, but instead of look- 
ing through nature up to nature's God, he worshipped and 
served the creature instead of the Creator, who is blessed for 
ever. He did not like to retain God in his knowledge ; he did 
not glorify Him as God ; he was not thankful ; he did not 
understand, as he should have done, the nature and character 
of the invisible Creator, from 4 ' the things which are made;" he 
became vain, dark, foolish, utterly corrupt, and filled with a 
reprobate mind. In all this he was without excuse, for not 
only was nature a revelation of " eternal power and Godhead," 
which should have rendered impossible to intelligent beings, 
the degrading sin of idolatry, but God had added to this out- 
ward witness, an inward witness to Himself and his will, in the 
voice of conscience. Man had been made a law to himself, 
and left to follow or transgress the law thus written by the 
finger of God on the tables of his heart. The moral law within 
and the material universe without, were the double testimony 
to duty and to God, granted during the patriarchal age. In 
spite of both, men universally became idolaters ; worshippers, 
not only of the brightest and grandest natural objects, such as 
the heavenly bodies, but of the lowest and most degraded, such 
as birds and beasts and creeping things, stocks and stones and 
inanimate images. A reflex degradation was one punishment 
of this great sin ; the idolater was given up by God to the 
lowest and vilest immorality. The heathen of our own day, 
the savage cannibals of the South Sea Islands, the ferocious 
fetish worshippers of Ashantee, the degraded aborigines of 
Australia, are specimens of the depth of moral depravity to 
which man may sink, when left to his own reading of the reve- 
lation afforded by nature. 

Corruption and violence were the characteristics of the cen- 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 329 

tral portion of the patriarchal age, which closed with the flood. 
Idolatry was the great sin of its final third, which extended 
from the Deluge to the Exodus. 

Egypt, the first mighty kingdom of antiquity, was the home 
and hot-bed of idolatry. The land was full of idol temples 
and idol monuments ; huge monsters in human form, men and 
beasts, and reptiles, and even insects and onions, were adored 
as deities, and God was utterly forgotten and ignored. When 
at last his Divine claims came into conflict with the will of 
man, human crime, as represented by that first kingdom, cul- 
minated in the cruel oppression of Israel, and haughty defiance 
of Jehovah. The proud monarch that bowed before loath- 
some reptiles, refused to bow before the King of kings. God- 
dishonouring idolatry, was mingled with God-defying audacity 
and rebellion ; and judgment overtook the guilty : the ten 
plagues of Egypt were sent in sore and sad succession, ending 
with death — the death of the first-born, and the destruction of 
Pharaoh and all his hosts in the Red Sea. 

Then followed the dispensation of law. Man was no 
longer left to conscience and the light of nature. God unfolded 
to him far more of his holy character and will, by means of 
the law promulgated from Sinai, while his purposes of mercy 
were darkly foreshadowed in the ceremonial worship which 
He thence enjoined on Israel. It was a new and advanced 
revelation. Amid thunders and darkness and thick clouds, 
God descended in the presence of the assembled thousands of 
his chosen people. The mountain smoked and burned with 
fire, while lightnings uplit the lurid spectacle with a terrific 
glare. 

A double law — moral and ceremonial — was given. Ten 
commandments were the principal embodiment of the former, 
while the establishment of the Tabernacle, the priesthood, and 
the Jewish worship, were the leading elements of the latter. 
The first was to convince of sin, the second to foreshadow its 
remedy. " The law entered that the offence might abound/' 
and its ceremonies were " a shadow of good things to come." 



33© DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 



With wonderful clearness and fulness the law revealed the 
holiness of God, his mercy, and his justice. He passed by 
and proclaimed Himself " the Lord, the Lord God, merciful 
and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and 
truth ; keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, trans- 
gression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty ; 
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, to the 
third and fourth generation." The whole Jewish dispensation 
was one long display of these Divine attributes, and afforded 
a revelation of God, deeper by far than that latent in nature. 
It had also the effect of testing man by a more searching pro- 
bation, and revealing with additional clearness his true charac- 
ter. Sin became more evident in the light of the laws enacted 
against it : " sin by the commandment became exceeding 
sinful." 

In the Jew, man stands forth, not merely as a sinner, but as 
a deliberate and persistent rebel against God, breaking every 
law imposed on him, abusing every privilege granted to him, 
and despising ever} 7 blessing bestowed. 

Before they had time to receive, in its written form, the law 
which had been orally delivered to them, Israel had violated 
its first great and fundamental command, " Thou shalt have 
no other Gods but me," and all their subsequent career was in 
harmony with this beginning. 

They sinned, and committed iniquity, they understood not 
God's wonders nor remembered his mercies, they provoked 
Him and forgot his works, they waited not for his counsel 
but lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in 
the desert ; they envied Moses and Aaron ; they changed their 
glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass ; they forgat 
God their Saviour and despised the pleasant land ; they mur- 
mured in their tents and hearkened not to the voice of the 
Lord; they joined themselves to Baal Peor, and ate the 
sacrifices of the dead ; they provoked God to anger with their 
inventions ; they did not destroy, as commanded, the idolatrous 
nations of Canaan, but were mingled among the heathen and 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 331 

learned their works ; they served their idols and sacrificed their 
sons and daughters unto devils ; they shed innocent blood, 
even the blood of their sons and daughters whom they sacri- 
ficed to the idols of Canaan ; they were defiled with their own 
works, and went a whoring with their own inventions, till the 
.wrath of the Lord was kindled against his people, and He 
abhorred his own inheritance. Many times did He deliver 
them, but they provoked Him with their counsel and were 
brought low for their iniquity. They persecuted every prophet 
that was sent to them, and after every deliverance, fell lower 
than before, into all manner of sin and evil. 

At last, long threatened judgment fell, and captivity after cap- 
tivity came upon the tribes of Israel ; Pul and Sennacherib in- 
vaded their land, Shalmanezer and Esarhaddon, kings of Assyria, 
conquered and enslaved the ten tribes, and Nebuchadnezzar took 
Jerusalem and carried Judah away captive to Babylon. The 
city that was full of people and esteemed " princess among the 
provinces," sat solitary and became tributary, the ways of Zion 
mourned, and her gates were desolate ; her beauty departed 
from Jerusalem, and she came down wonderfully ; God covered 
the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger, and cast down 
the beauty of Israel ; He cast off his altar, and abhorred his 
sanctuary, gave his people into the hand of the enemy, and 
scattered their princes among the Gentiles. " The precious 
sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold," were " esteemed as 
earthen pitchers " — the adversary took possession of the gates 
of Jerusalem. The Lamentations of Jeremiah tell how deeply 
the chastisement was felt ; the confessions of Daniel show what 
searchings of heart and what contrition it created. 

But the restoration of Israel under Ezra and Nehemiah, 
and their prolonged probation, in their land, proved that the 
awful lesson had been all in vain. Erophet after prophet had 
announced to them the advent of Messiah the Prince. In due 
time He came. God was manifest in the flesh. He came 
unto his own, — to this people whom for over two thousand 
years He had been preparing to receive Him ; but " his own 



332 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

received Him not." They " despised and rejected Him ;" they 
hated Him because He testified of them that their deeds were 
evil ; they blasphemed the Son of God, accusing Him of deriv- 
ing his power from the Prince of Devils ; they took counsel 
together to slay the Holy and the Just ; they bore false witness 
against Him to put Him to death ; they became his betrayers 
and murderers ; they cried, " Crucify Him, crucify Him," and 
by their wicked hands, He was crucified and slain. 

And when the still lingering longsufTering of God, sent them 
one more chance of repentance, and the risen Saviour told his 
apostles that remission of sins through his name, was to be 
preached among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem, when the 
Holy Ghost in Peter and in Stephen pleaded still with Israel 
to repent and be converted, they filled up the measure of their 
iniquities by rejecting this final offer of mercy. They slew 
Stephen, and persecuted the Church. " The Jews both killed 
the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted 
us ; they please not God, and are contrary to all men, forbid- 
ding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to 
fill up their sins alway, for wrath is come upon them to the 
uttermost" (i Thess. ii. 15, 16). 

A few years elapsed, after those words were written, and 
then that wrath was poured out. Jerusalem fell, and great 
was the fall thereof ! Signal, terrible and unparalleled was the 
Jewish war, ending with the siege and capture of Jerusalem 
by Titus. It needs a pen dipped in fire and in blood to 
write the story in its true colours ! The sufferings and miseries 
that overtook the Jewish nation in that age, are all but inde- 
scribable, the very record of them is appalling. One million 
one hundred thousand Jewish lives were sacrificed in the siege 
and capture of Jerusalem alone ; streams of human blood ex- 
tinguished the blazing fires that destroyed the houses of the 
city, and heaps of the unburied corpses of those who had died 
of starvation during the siege, hid from the Roman soldiers the 
immense treasures of the temple. From April 14th, when the 
siege began, to July 1st, — 115,880 bodies were buried at the 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 333 



public expense, or thrown from the walls, not including those 
interred by their friends. Some said that 600,000 of the poorer 
people had perished of want ; women cooked and ate their 
own children, " the maimed and defenceless people were slain 
in thousands"; when the temple at last fell, " they lay heaped 
like sacrifices round the altar, and the steps of the temple 
ran with streams of blood, which washed down the bodies that 
lay about." "The slaughter within was even more dreadful 
than the spectacle from without, ... it was indiscriminate 
carnage. The number of the slain exceeded that of the slayers. 
. . . The treasuries, with their wealth of money, jewels, and 
costly robes, were totally destroyed. . . . The value of 
the plunder obtained was so great, that gold fell in Syria to 
half its former value." 

Milman, after describing the long and awful siege, and the 
multiplied suffering of the Jews, says, " Thus fell, and for ever, 
the metropolis of the Jewish State. Other cities have risen on 
the ruins of Jerusalem, and succeeded as it were to the inalien- 
able inheritance of perpetual siege, oppression, and ruin. 
Jerusalem might almost seem to be a place under a peculiar 
curse ; it has probably seen a far greater portion of human 
misery than any other spot upon the earth." 

After its fall, " the markets of the Roman Empire were glutted 
with Jewish slaves ; the amphitheatres were crowded with these 
miserable people, who were forced to slay each other, not singly 
but in troops, or else fall in rapid succession, glad to escape the 
tyranny of their masters by the expeditious cruelty of the wild 
beasts. And in the unwholesome mines hundreds were doomed 
to toil for wealth not to be their own." "The political exist- 
ence of the Jewish nation was annihilated ; it was never again 
recognised as one of the States or kingdoms of the world. 
Judea was sentenced to be portioned out to strangers, the 
capital was destroyed, the temple demolished, the high priest- 
hood buried in its ruins, and the royal race extinct." 

Titus had destroyed the temple and city of the Jews, and 
slaughtered and captured and sold into slavery millions of the 



334 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

people. About seventy years later, the Jews had sufficiently 
recovered from this crushing blow, to rise afresh in revolt 
against the Roman power, and then Adrian completed the 
work of their dispersion among all nations of the earth. He 
made the whole country of Palestine a desolation, expelled all 
its remaining Jewish inhabitants, forbade the Jews on pain of 
death even to approach ^Elia Capitolina, the Roman city erected 
on the site of Jerusalem ; he slaughtered 580,000 Jews in a 
murderous war which lasted three years and a half, and sold 
thousands of prisoners, at the lowest prices, into slavery. The 
rest took refuge in foreign lands, and Palestine has never since 
been inhabited by the children of Israel. 

Eighteen centuries have elapsed, since that fearful judgment 
of fire and blood, attested the righteous " severity " of God 
against those who had despised his " goodness." It was but 
the beginning of the "indignation" against the Jewish people. 
Ever since they have been scattered among the Gentiles, in 
Europe, Asia, and Africa, denizens everywhere, citizens no- 
where ; oppressed and persecuted in most countries, banished 
at times in turn from each ; treated with indignity, injustice, and 
cruelty, they yet survive, a separate and peculiar people ; a 
nation without a land, while their land lies desolate, without a 
people 1 and their city, as Christ foretold it would be, is trodden 
down of the Gentiles, till " the times of the Gentiles " shall be 
fulfilled. 

The third dispensation, "the times of the Gentiles," 
brought a revelation of God, fuller, truer, more glorious by far, 
than any that had preceded it. " God was manifest in the flesh? 
men saw, and heard, and spoke with, incarnate Deity. " The 
law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus 
Christ." " God, who at sundry times and in divers manners 
spake in time past unto the fathers by the propets, hath in 
these last days spoken unto us by his Son." " No man hath seen 
God at any time, the only begotten Son which is in the bosom 
of the Father, He hath declared Him." Not the power and 
wisdom only, not the righteousness and justice only, but the 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 335 

kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man, appeared, 
in the life and death of Jesus Christ our Lord. God was 
proved to be a gracious Redeemer, as well as a holy Lawgiver, 
and an Almighty Creator. The shadows of the Law were re- 
placed by the realities of the Gospel, the New Testament was 
added to the Old, its key and its completion ; the great salva- 
tion so long foreshadowed, was accomplished and brought nigh 
to man. God had provided Himself a Lamb to take away the 
sins of the world, and that Lamb, his own glorious Son, the 
Lord of all ! " Herein is love ; not that we loved God, but that 
He loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins." 

What a flood of light fell upon the world in the teachings of 
Christ and his apostles ! The gift of the Holy Ghost followed 
on the ascension of the risen Saviour ; the Christian Church 
was founded, and gathered, from Jew and Gentile alike, a vast 
multitude into its bosom. In spite of persecution it grew and 
multiplied, for God was with his people ; they endured and 
conquered, winning the world to their creed. Paganism fell. 
The mighty Roman .Empire shut up its idol temples, sheathed 
its persecuting sword, and sat down as a disciple at the feet 
of Christ and his apostles. 

Grace had wrought a wondrous work, but nature was un- 
changed. The natural man was still at enmity with God, and 
the cloak of Christianity, could not long conceal his corruption. 

An apostasy of a dark and dreadful nature arose, and in 
the progress of ages assumed enormous proportions, and a 
character so diabolic, as to exceed in guilt all the idolatries of 
the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations. The greater light 
granted was abused and perverted, until it became a darkness 
exceeding any previous darkness — and the central period of its 
duration is, by common consent, called " the dark ages.' ; 

The religion of Christ became gradually, as we have seen, 
the religion of Antichrist. Carnal observances replaced spi- 
ritual conversion, the ceremonial took the place of the moral, 
human tradition obscured the word of God, human authority 



336 DIVINE SYSTEM Oh TIMES AND SEASONS. 

asserted itself in opposition to Divine ; and idolatry, under the 
guise of Christianity, replaced true and spiritual worship. 

When Pagan Rome fell, Papal Rome rose. Corruptions, 
heresies, abominable practices abounded. The teachings of 
Christ were forgotten, and the teachings of the church put in 
their place. It became a sin to believe the truth and serve 
the living God, yea, it was soon esteemed the worst of crimes 
to follow the Lord wholly. The saints were persecuted. In 
streams, ay ! in rivers, their blood was shed, till the professing 
church of Christ became " drunk ;; with the blood of his true 
disciples. Millions more martyrs fell under the sword of Papal 
Rome than were slain by the power of the Pagan Empire 
which ruled from the seven-hilled city. 

The head of this great Apostasy put himself in the place of 
Christ as head of the church. He wore a ring to show himself 
bridegroom, husband of the church ; he proclaimed himself her 
prophet, priest, and king ; he assumed to be Prince of the kings 
of the earth : King of kings and Lord of lords. He wore a 
triple crown, and claimed dominion in heaven, earth, and hell ; 
power to pardon sins on earth, to loose from pains in hell, and 
to canonise whom he would in heaven ; he carried two swords, 
to mark his temporal and spiritual government ; he sat in the 
temple of God ; received worship as God ; and arrogated to 
himself Divine attributes and authority. 

Doctrines of devils were taught to the people instead of the 
precepts of the Gospel. The mass was presented to the multi- 
tudes instead of the atoning Sacrifice of the Saviour, the wafer 
god, instead of Christ : indulgences for sin were sold for money, 
turning the grace of God into lasciviousness. The true nature 
of holiness was completely obscured, as well as the true nature 
of sin, and the true nature of Christ's religion. The priesthood, 
sunk in the profoundest ignorance and in the grossest corrup- 
tion, kept the people in the dark, that they might the more 
readily prey upon them ; the Bible was buried in an unknown 
tongue, and might almost as well not have been in existence. 
Christianity retained no trace of its pure and holy original. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 337 

Human intelligence revolted from the gross and monstrous lie, 
and thus Christian corruption created a reaction, and called 
into existence indirectly, in early days, the Mohammedanism 
which protests against all creature worship, and in later days, 
the Infidelity which denies Christ altogether, and the Atheism 
which excludes all worship of God. 

For a thousand years this Babylon reigned paramount in the 
Roman Earth, and then God began to consume and destroy it. 
He raised up holy men and wise, to protest against it ; He gave 
back, by their means, his Word to the nations ; He gave his 
people grace to love not their lives, but to sacrifice them freely, 
that the faith of Christ might be restored in the earth. A re- 
formed church arose, and with its reformed doctrines, came 
reformation of manners, and something of a return to primitive 
Christian purity and practice. But even here darkness quickly 
entered again. The Reformation did not go far enough, it did 
not purge out all the old leaven, it retained some principles of 
corruption, which caused the reformed churches quickly to 
degenerate into worldly corporations, unable to protest, with 
the spiritual power of the first Reformers, against the corrup- 
tions of Eopery, or to grapple with the more rapidly growing 
forces of the infidelity it had created. 

As to the Apostasy itself, no protests availed to reform it, no 
teachings to enlighten it, no examples to shame it, no warnings 
to awaken it : and at length judgment fell. The godless infi- 
delity which had sprung up in the earth, as the result of Papal 
deeds and doctrines, rose in arms against it, and plunged 
both Papacy and monarchy into a sea of blood. The French 
Revolution ! Who can depict its horrors ? Vials of wrath were 
poured out on the Papal kingdoms of Christendom. One 
country after another was visited with vengeance ; wars, and 
bloody revolutions, internal strifes and contentions, darkened 
the realms of the Papacy ; and the Popes lost gradually all 
their direct authority over the kingdoms of Europe ; all their 
political power ; and enormous wealth in the shape of landed 
property and buildings, monasteries and convents. And 

z 



338 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AXD SEASONS. 

still the measure of their iniquity was not full ; the sore judg- 
ments of God led them not to repentance. The crowning 
crime came at last, and the Papacy, which had • decreed the 
" immaculate conception " of an idolatrously worshipped wo- 
man, proceeded to decree the "infallibility : ' of a sinful man. 

By the consent and decree of the (Ecumenical Council of 
1870, the Divine title of infallible teacher of faith and morals 
was given to the Pope of Rome. After twelve centuries of 
heresy and hypocrisy, corruption and persecution, the "man of 
sin ; ' seals all his awful errors, and all his flagrant and revolting 
crimes, with the seal of " infallibility," and claims for all his 
doctrines of devils the authority of Divine inspiration ! 

"While the words were yet in his mouth, judgment fell. War 
burst forth ; Sadowa and Sedan crushed the might of the two 
most powerful Catholic nations of Europe. France, over- 
whelmed by the victorious armies of Protestant Germany, was 
fain to recall from Rome the French bayonets, which had long 
been the sole support of the Papal throne, and Victor Emmanuel 
entered the city as King of Italy. The temporal power of the 
Papacy was swept clean away, the throne of a thousand years 
was overturned, the Pope became "a prisoner in the Vatican." 
The long drama of the Papal temporal power is ended ; there 
remains that its spiritual power be also destroyed. The Lord 
has consigned it by the spirit of his mouth, He is to destroy it 
by the brightness of his coming. 

Nor have those sections of Christendom, which escaped the 
influence of the Romish apostasy, continued in the goodness 
of God. Apostasy has been universal. If we trace the history, 
and note the condition, of the Eastern churches, the Coptic, 
Armenian, Nestorian, Syrian, or Greek professing Christian 
churches, we shall see the same thing. In all, sooner or later, 
the light of truth, so graciously granted, has been first ob- 
scured, and then lost, while a darkness, all the more dangerous 
in that it professes to be light, has taken its place. The wor- 
ship offered in these churches, has for ages been little better 
than idolatry; the morality practised, and the doctrines in- 



THE LA W OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 339 

culcated, at fundamental variance with those of Christ. The 
scourge of Islamism was the awful judgment sent as a woe on 
the Eastern churches ; but it did not lead them to repentance. 
For twelve centuries they have groaned under its cruel op 
pression, but they have not forsaken their idolatries and evil 
deeds. They are now drinking the last dregs of the cup of 
judgment ; and the Porte like the Papacy, true to the last to its 
character, is hurting, killing, and tormenting to the bitter end. 
But its days are numbered : the full and final judgment of 
God is soon to overtake both oppressor and oppressed : " when 
the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven, in flaming fire, 
taking vengeance on those who," — in spite of all his revelations 
of Himself, — " know not God, and obey not the Gospel of our 
Lord Jesus Christ." 

Intensely mournful is the review of human history as regards 
man's treatment of God, in his threefold revelation of Him- 
self, as Creator, Lawgiver, and Redeemer. 

Having the light of nature, fallen man sinned ; blessed with 
the additional light of law, including commandments, and 
types and shadows, the ministry of inspired prophets, and the 
incarnation of God Himself, he sinned still worse; and favoured 
with the full blaze of grace and truth, in the teaching and 
work of Jesus Christ, in the illuminations of the Spirit of God, 
and the possession of the New Testament, as well as warned 
by the awful judgments which closed the former dispensations, 
man has sinned worst of all, and incurred the heavier judg- 
ments foretold in the Scriptures of truth, and soon to fall on 
the earth ! 

How can the heirs of salvation ever be sufficiently grateful 
for the sovereign, unmerited mercy that has delivered them 
from the kingdom of darkness, and translated them into the 
kingdom of God's dear Son? How can they ever be suffi- 
ciently earnest, in urging the ungodly to flee from the wrath 
to come — the lost to seek, while there is time, the salvation 
which is in Christ Jesus ? 

But unspeakably blessed, on the other hand, is this review 



340 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

of human history, in the light of God's treatment of man, in his 
threefold and ever-increasing sinfulness. It is an illustration 
of his power, wisdom, and love in overcoming evil with good. 
For out of each dispensation, marred by the sin of man, God 
has delivered a ransomed people, and raised them to greater 
heights of blessing than before. In the patriarchal age, He 
brought through the waters of the flood, the family of Noah, 
and then from Shem He produced the Hebrew race, through 
which salvation to the ends of the earth was to come. From 
the destructive and overwhelming judgments of Egypt He 
delivered Israel, and their Exodus brought them into new 
and nearer relationships to Himself, than man had ever known 
before ; " ye shall be unto Me a peculiar people ; " and from 
the desolating captivities of Israel and Judah, a remnant re- 
turned, destined to see the Desire of all ages, to behold the 
rising of the Sun of righteousness, to welcome to his temple 
the Lord Himself. 

From the still more awful and desolating judgments poured 
out on the Jewish nation in" consequence of their rejection 
of Christ, God brought forth the Christian church. " Through 
their fall salvation is come to the Gentiles." The branches 
were broken off, but the wild olive was graffed in, the casting 
away of them, was the reconciling of the world. 

And then, — God's ways progressing ever from evening to 
morning, from good to better, — out of the closing judgments 
of these " Times of the Gentiles " whose thunders are already 
breaking on our ears and whose lurid lightnings are already 
flashing in our skies, shall spring the restoration of Israel, the 
return of Israel's Messiah, the resurrection of the dead in 
Christ, the rapture of the entire Christian church, the times of 
the restitution of all things, the millennial reign of Christ. 

That in its turn will, as the very brief notice in Scripture 
proves, be a fresh revelation of God, and a fresh probation of 
man, and will end, like all the rest, in judgment — the great 
dread, long-foretold Day of final Judgment, which will usher in 
the eternal day, the " new heaven and the new earth wherein 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 341 

dwelleth righteousness," into which sin shall never enter, and 
where consequently death and the curse shall be no more. 
(Rev. xx., xxi.) 

This is the great climax which closes the first week of human 
history, introducing untold ages of unspeakable blessedness 
for the human race, those " ages to come," in which God will 
show the exceeding riches of his grace, in his kindness 
towards his people, through Christ Jesus. 

Each of the three dispensations into which human history 
has been divided, has therefore its distinctive and peculiar 
character, though the three resemble each other in this, that 
each ends in apostasy on the part of man, and in judgment, 
and the introduction of a higher economy, on the part of God. 

The patriarchal age is broadly distinguished by the fact of 
its having " no law," from the Jewish, and this again, by its 
limitation of nationality, from the Times of the Gentiles ; but 
the flood, and the exodus, and the captivities, and the fall of 
Jerusalem, and the yet future destruction of the beast and the 
false prophet, and Babylon the Great, at the Epiphany of 
Christ, mark out so many distinct closes and re-commencements, 
wherein God executes deserved and long-denounced doom on 
the guilty, while delivering and raising to a higher level an 
elect and ransomed people. 

We proceed now to trace the chronological measures of 
these three dispensations, and their respective positions, in the 
great stream of time. We will take the Times of the Gentiles 
first, as it is the most important, the most closely connected 
with the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse, and the 
one whose duration is most distinctly defined in Scripture. 

Chronological Measures of the Times of the Gentiles. 
When the Egyptian captivity of his seed was announced to 
Abraham, chronological limits were assigned to it ; and when 
the Babylonish captivity was foretold by Isaiah, seventy years 
was fixed as its duration. It might therefore be expected that 
the length of the period of Jewish affliction and degradation, 



342 VI VINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

which is termed by our Lord "the Times of the Gentiles," 
would also be more or less distinctly foretold : yet as it includes 
the times of the Christian Church— those ages of waiting for 
Christ, over which in tender mercy God saw fit to throw, as 
we have seen, a veil of mystery, — it is improbable that its dura- 
tion will anywhere be revealed in plain terms. 

We have already shown that this period or dispensation is 
that, during which the Jews are either wholly cast out of their 
land, or allowed to occupy it as mere tributaries, and during 
which also, the throne is taken from the house of Judah, and 
from the seed of David, and given by God to Gentile monarchs. 
It is the period during which the land of Canaan, promised to 
the seed of Abraham, and the throne of Israel, secured by 
covenant to the seed of David, are both alienated, and occu- 
pied by Gentiles instead of Jews. During by far the greater 
part of this period, Israel has been scattered among all nations* 
Jerusalem " trodden down of the Gentiles," and the pleasant 
land laid desolate. 

The whole period is occupied by the duration of the four 
great monarchies, and it is to be closed by a fifth great 
monarchy, " the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom which 
shall never be destroyed ... it shall stand for ever " — a 
kingdom symbolised by the stone cut out without hands, which 
smites and destroys the image, becomes a great mountain, and 
fills the whole earth. (Dan. ii. 44.) 

This kingdom is, as we learn from other Scriptures, the 
kingdom of Christ Himself, and his accession to the throne of 
the earth, marks the termination of the Times of the Gentiles. 
" The Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of his father 
David." David foresaw that of the fruit of his loins, God would 
raise up Christ, to sit upon his throne. God will overturn one 
monarchy after another, "until He come, whose right it is," and 
will give the throne to Him. 

And prior to this restoration of the throne to the house of 
Judah in the person of Christ, will be the restoration of the 
land of Canaan to the seed of Abraham. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 343 

" And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall 
set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of 
his people which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, 
and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from 
Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. He 
shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the 
dispersed of Judah, from the four corners of the earth " (Isa. ii. 
n). God has not cast away his people whom He foreknew, 
they are still beloved for the fathers' sakes, and in due time, 
when the fulness of the Gentiles has been brought in, "all Israel 
shall be saved/' The gifts and calling of God are without 
repentance \ the land must revert to its rightful owners the seed 
of Abraham, and the throne must be filled by its predicted 
occupant, the Son of David, the Prince of peace, of the in- 
crease of whose government there shall be no end, who shall 
"order and establish the kingdom, with judgment and with 
justice, for ever." 

However improbable it may appear that Palestine should 
ever again be the home of a mighty Jewish nation, Scripture 
leaves no room to doubt that such will be the case, — that the 
same Almighty arm, which to place Israel there of old, plagued 
Egypt, destroyed the host of Pharaoh, and extirpated almost 
entirely the seven nations of Canaan ; which subsequently 
overthrew the mighty Babylonian monarchy, in order to restore 
Israel to it for a comparatively brief period, by means of Cyrus 
and Artaxerxes, will in due time overthrow the Turkish power 
which has so long trodden down Jerusalem, defiled the sanc- 
tuary, and desolated the land of Israel, and will, the second 
time, restore his ancient people, to their inalienable inherit- 
ance. Every barrier must fall, every obstacle be overthrown, 
that the purpose of God may be accomplished, and the pro- 
mises to Abraham and to his seed be fulfilled. 

God has clearly revealed that all this shall be ; has He also 
revealed when it shall be ? He has revealed the character of 
the Times of the Gentiles ; has He also revealed their dura- 
tion ? We believe He has, very distinctly, though not in plain 



344 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

statements. He has given many a clue and many a mystic 
intimation, which when combined, by those who compare 
Scripture prophecy with Scripture history, and with profane 
history, afford no indistinct reply to this inquiry. It is of 
course needful to take profane history into account in consider- 
ing this question, as many of the events predicted extend beyond 
the point at which inspired records cease. Nor should we have 
the slightest hesitation in doing this, for we are evidently in- 
tended to make use of uninspired historical evidence. Scripture 
history ceases just at the point where by common consent pro- 
fane history becomes reliable, and passes from the dim regions 
of fable into the broad daylight of well ascertained facts. God 
graciously presents us with inspired records of that far distant 
past of which no uninspired records exist ; but where authentic 
histories are in existence, He leaves us to learn from them 
what the course of mundane events has been. He makes 
provision for our unavoidable ignorance, but none for our 
indolence. He puts into our hands the telescope of Scripture 
history, to enable us to see farther into the distant past, than 
would with the naked human eye be possible ; but He does 
not embody in the sacred writings, matters, such as the fall oi 
Jerusalem and the dispersion of the Jewish people in the days 
of Titus, which are sufficiently well attested by Josephus and 
other careful historians. 

Looking then both at ancient prophecy and at sacred and 
profane history, what do we learn as to the duration of these 
" Times of the Gentiles " ? 

That they are appointed to extend over a great 
week, over ic seven times," seven years whose days are 
years, 2520 natural years. 

This is inferred from Scripture rather than distinctly stated 
in it ; but the inference is so well grounded as to be of almost 
equal weight with a distinct declaration. 

When this long period of Jewish desolation and chastisement 
was first threatened (Lev. xxvi.), the expression "seven times" 
was emphatically used in connection with it. That this had any 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 345 

chronological force, was not of course understood by those who 
received the warning, but it is almost impossible in the light 
of subsequent predictions, and in the light of history, to doubt 
that the Omniscient God used an expression in harmony with 
his foreknowledge of Israel's future, and expressive of his 
Divine purpose — a purpose which we have seen wrought out 
in history. By the lips of Moses, God forewarned his people, 
saying,— 

" If ye will not yet for all this hearken unto Me, then I will punish you 
seven times more for your sins . . . and if ye will not be reformed by 
Me by these things, but will walk contrary unto Me, then will I also walk 
contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins . . . 
And if ye will not for all this hearken unto Me . . . then I will walk con- 
trary unto you also in fury, and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for 
your sins. ... I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries 
unto desolation . . . and I will scatter you among the heathen, and will 
draw out a sword after you . . . and ye shall perish among the heathen, 
and the land of your enemies shall eat you up " (Lev. xxvi.). 

Old Testament history shows that Israel's oft-recurring and 
inveterate idolatry brought upon them judgment after judgment; 
that again and again God " being full of compassion forgave 
their iniquity and destroyed them not; yea, many a time turned 
He his anger awa/% and did not stir up all his wrath ; for 
He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passeth 
away and cometh not again ; " but that at last the measure of 
their iniquity being filled up, He sent upon them a chastise- 
ment, the perfect character of which is marked out by the per- 
fection of its period, " seven times." 

Seventy years, — the first portion ot this long season of re- 
jection, dispersion, and affliction, were spent in absolute cap- 
tivity in Babylon and Assyria. The second stage was longer 
— it was the " seventy weeks," or 490 years of the restoration 
of Judah, and was passed by the restored remnant of the two 
tribes in a subject, tributary, and troubled state, in their own 
land, while the ten tribes remained captives in Assyria. This 
extended to the coming of Messiah the Prince, and the de- 
struction of Temsalem consequent on his rejection ; and then 



346 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

commenced the third and longest portion of the 2520 years, 
which the Jews have passed in miserable exile, scattered over 
all the countries of the earth. 

Already their chastisement has extended over " seven times," 
dating from the earliest stage in their captivities : it will soon 
have done so, dating from the latest. Does not then, the solemn 
threat, fulfilled in such awful justice through a long succession 
of ages, gleam now with the light of hope, and assume the 
cheering tones of mercy? "Seven times." No more! then 
the curse that has fallen so heavily, is all but exhausted, and 
everlasting blessedness is to succeed. The wrath has come 
upon Israel to the uttermost ; the fountain for sin and for un- 
cleanness, shall ere long be opened to the house of David, and 
to the inhabitants of Jerusalem. 

And secondly, though the fourfold image which symbolised 
to Nebuchadnezzar, the succession of Gentile empires, which 
were to fill up this long interval of Jewish rejection, had no 
chronology attached to it, yet we know that those empires, the 
Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Pagan and Papal 
Roman powers, have as a matter of history lasted for about 
2520 years. Now history is the evolution of the determinate 
counsel and foreknowledge of God, which must therefore have 
before assigned to " the Times of the Gentiles " at least this 
duration. 

The symbol of the fourfold image declared, that these Gentile 
empires were to be succeeded by the kingdom of the God of 
heaven, but it did not reveal or even intimate when, or after 
what lapse of time, this should be. A subsequent vision 
granted to Nebuchadnezzar, did. He saw a tree, which he 
was told symbolised himself, cut down, and its stump left to be 
wet with the dew of heaven, and its portion with the beasts in 
the grass of the earth, its heart changed from a man's heart, and 
a beast's heart given it, until " seven times " should pass over it. 

This vision was, as Daniel told the monarch, a prophecy of 
the seven years' insanity, which, as a chastening for his pride, 
was to overtake him } and which was to teach him to know God, 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 347 

and to own that " the heavens do rule." "All this came upon 
King Nebuchadnezzar," and at the end of the days, that is, ot 
the seven years of his insanity, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, 
his understanding returned to him, and he blessed and praised 
and honoured the Eternal God, whose dominion is everlasting, 
whose will is sovereign, whose power is infinite, and who is able 
to abase those who walk in pride. 

Now the vision of the tree is not more clearly symbolic of 
this remarkable incident in Nebuchadnezzar's life, than that 
incident itself is typical of certain moral and chronological 
features, of the succession of Gentile monarchies, of which 
Nebuchadnezzar was both head and representative. 

The leading moral characteristics of all the four great empires 
have been, ignorance of God, idolatry, and cruel persecution of 
the saints. Nebuchadnezzar, prior to this incident, knew not 
God ; he set up a great image, and commanded all men, on pain 
of death, to fall down and worship it. He cast into the burn- 
ing fiery furnace the faithful witnesses who refused to obey the 
idolatrous mandate. How have all his successors with one 
consent followed this example ! Idolatry, literal or spiritual, 
and persecution, Pagan or Papal, have marked the whole suc- 
cession of Gentile monarchies. These episodes in Nebuchad- 
nezzar's life are clearly typical ; these features of his character 
have been stamped indelibly on all his successors. These in- 
cidents answer to events on the scale of nations and centuries 
with which history makes us familiar. So also does the seven 
years 1 bestial degradation of the monarch during his insanity, 
answer to the period of Gentile ride represented by the four 
wild beasts of a subsequent vision. " The king himself repre- 
sents the succession of imperial sovereignty, till the kingdom 
of Christ shall come ; the ' seven times ' that passed over him 
must therefore represent the whole period of debasement in the 
Gentile kingdoms, from the times of Nebuchadnezzar till their 
full redemption." * 

*Birks' "Elements," p. 353. 



343 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

As we have alluded elsewhere to this subject we do not dwell 
further on it here ; it affords strong confirmation of the view 
that the " seven times " of Lev. xxvi. has a chronological force. 
A further argument in support of the same view may be 
derived from the " time times and a half" of the " little horn." 
We have seen that prophecy assigns to the x\postasy of the 
latter days, a duration of 1260 years, and that this period is 
repeatedly spoken of as half a week. Where are we to find the 
other half of this great week ? As the Apostasy is to be over- 
thrown finally by the advent of Christ, it is clear the other 
half cannot follow but must precede the half which measures the 
existence of the Apostasy, it must date back, that is, from its 
rise. Calculating backwards then from the rise of the Papal 
and Mohammedan powers in the beginning of the seventh 
century, 1260 years lead up to the days of Nebuchadnezzar- 
to the commencement of the Babylonish Captivity, the point at 
which we know the Times of the Gentiles began. Thus we see 
that the entire period occupied by the four great empires, re- 
presented by the golden image, and by the four beasts, is the 
whole week, whose latter half is the time of the dominion of 
the "little horn." During the whole of this period Israel has 
ceased to be an independent kingdom, and during two-thirds* 
of it, Jerusalem has been trodden down by the Gentiles. Each 
of the four great monarchies in turn ruled over the seed of 
Abraham, until at length, the cup of Jewish iniquity being full, 
the Romans came, took away their place and nation, and 
almost destroyed them as a people. Seventy years before this 
final judgment, Messiah came and was cut off, and his rejection 
and crucifixion by the Jews, which sealed and brought on their 
doom, inaugurated the Gospel dispensation, and the ingathering 
of the Gentiles to the kingdom of God. Thus the Christian 
dispensation, so thoroughly Gentile in its aspect, fills two-thirds 
of the Times of the Gentiles, the first third having been 
occupied with the growth of Gentile dominion, to the extra- 
ordinary development it had attained in the days of Augustus 
Caesar. We conclude therefore that the dispensation in whose 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 349 

closing days we live, was fore-ordained and appointed by God 
to run a course of 2520 years, or in symbolic language of 
"seven times;" and that our Lord Jesus Christ had this 
great week in his mind when He said, "Jerusalem shall be 
trodden down of the Gentiles, until the Times of the Gentiles 
be fulfilled," an expression which seems to imply that the 
period so designated had definite chronological limits. We 
proceed to inquire when it took its rise. From what great 
event are we to date the commencement of these " Times of 
the Gentiles " ? 

Happily the answer is not far to seek. We are not left to 
select among the complex changes of history, one which seems 
to us of paramount importance. Inspiration itself settles the 
question. The entire course of Gentile supremacy is sym- 
bolised by an image whose head was its beginning, and whose 
ten toes are chronologically its end. 

Interpreting his dream by Divine revelation, to the proud 
monarch of Babylon, the prophet says to him " Thou art this 
head of gold." If by this be meant "thou " personally, then 
the " terminus a quo " or starting point of the " Times of the 
Gentiles " must be sought, as has generally been done, some- 
where in the lifetime of Nebuchadnezzar. 

But it seems clear that this was not the case, and that 
Daniel addressed the Babylonian king not as an individual, 
but as the representative of the empire, for immediately after 
saying " thou art this head of gold," he adds, " and after thee 
shall arise another kingdom, inferior to thee? alluding to the 
Medo-Persian Empire which succeeded the Babylonian. 

Now this empire did not rise after Nebuchadnezzar himself, 
but after his kingdom. It rose on the fall of the Babylonian 
Empire, but not till four successors of Nebuchadnezzar had 
occupied the throne, of whom Belshazzar was the last. 

Though undoubtedly its most illustrious ruler, Nebuchad- 
nezzar was neither the first nor the last head of the Babylonian 
Empire, which lasted 210 years. The "head of gold" 
evidently represents the whole Babylonian power, just as the 



350 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

"breast of silver" represents the whole Medo-Persian, and it 
seems natural therefore to suppose that one main starting 
point of those times of the Gentiles, which include the four 
great empires, will be found at the era of the rise of the first of 
the four, i.e., of the Babylonian power. 

This great dispensational period, the times of the Gentiles, 
i§ characterized by two distinct features, the dominion of the 
four great empires, and the loss of dominion and independence 
on the part of the Jewish people ; their subjection to and 
sufferings under their enemies ; their dispersion among all 
nations, and the desolation of their land. 

The commencing era of the " Times of the Gentiles " must 
be an era of decay and fall of Jewish independence, coincident 
with a rise of Babylonian power. 

Now the seventy years' captivity of Judah in Babylon was 
not the beginning of the decay and fall of Jewish indepen- 
dence, nor was it the beginning of the rise of the Babylonian 
power. 

The year of the accession of Nabonassar, the first king of 
Babylon, is an era of great historic importance. It ranks with 
the greatest eras of history : the Greek era of the Olympiads ; 
the Roman a.u.c. or era of the foundation of the city of Rome ; 
the Syrian era of the Seleucidas ; the Christian era of the 
Nativity ; the Papal era of indictions (dating from the conver- 
sion of Constantine, the fall of Paganism, and the beginning of 
the Imperial Church); and the Mohammedan era of the Hegira. 

Moreover, the exact chronological point of this " era of 
Nabonassar" (N.E.) is more certain than any other date of 
remote antiquity, because, with it are connected a series of 
ancient astronomic observations, which have been verified by 
the labours of astronomers, during the last three centuries. It 
is certain not only to a year, but to a day and hour. It is 
noon of the 26th of February, 747 B.C. 

That this important era, marking the commencement of the 
Babylonian power, should be one starting point of the 2520 
years of the " Times of the Gentiles," seems as natural and 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 351 

suitable as that the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar 
should be another. 

Like other national changes, and like many great political 
revolutions, the subjugation of the twelve tribes of Israel to the 
Assyrian and Babylonian powers, was only gradually accom- 
plished. Monarch after monarch came up against the land ; 
and one deportation of captives succeeded another. Ephrami 
first fell, then Judah : and Judah fell first partially, into the 
rank of a tributary kingdom, then completely, into the bitterest 
bondage, captivity, and degradation. Pul and Tiglath-pileser, 
Shalmanezer and Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Nebuchad- 
nezzar, all played their parts in the great and mournful tragedy. 
The following brief summary of the facts may be verified by 
reference to Scripture. 

The earliest invasion of the land, which resulted in a carrying 
captive of Israelites, was that recorded in 2 Kings xv. 19, in 
the reign of Menahem, king of Israel. ' ' Pul, the king of 
Assyria came against the land, and Menahem gave him a thou- 
sand talents of silver." And in 1 Chron. v. 26 we read that 
this Pul, and also Tiglath-pileser, carried away the Reubenites 
and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought 
them " unto Halah and Habor, and to the river Gozan," i.e., 
into Assyria. 

Subsequently Ahaz king of Judah, when alarmed by the com- 
bined attack of Pekah king of Israel and Resin king of Syria, 
sent to Tiglath-pileser to come to his aid, instead of trusting 
in God as Isaiah counselled him, and being quiet. It was like 
the sheep calling the wolf to his aid ! He invited an enemy 
who soon overran the land. After taking Damascus from the 
king of Syria, Tiglath-pileser took a number of places in the 
land of Naphtali, and " carried their inhabitants captive to 
Assyria" (2 Kings xv. 29). 

His successor, Shalmanezer, invaded in force the kingdom of 
the ten tribes, and after a three years' siege took Samaria, the 
capital, and carried all Israel away into Assyria (2 Kings xvii, 

3-6)- 



352 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Sennacherib afterwards invaded Judah, and ravaged the 
country for four or five years, taking every place of any strength, 
and at last besieging Jerusalem. Brought to the very verge of 
ruin, the city was at that time saved by a stupendous miracle, in 
answer to the prayer of the good king Hezekiah, himself simi- 
larly saved from the jaws of death not long after. The day 
o( Jerusalem's fall had not yet fully come (2 Kings xviii., xix.). 

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, 
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed ; 
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, 
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever were sfcili. 

And the widows of Asshur are loud in their wail ; 
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal? 
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, 
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord ! 

The impious and profane Sennacherib was murdered by his 
sons as he was worshipping in the house of Nisroch his god, and 
Esarhaddon his son reigned in his stead. This king carried 
captive another detachment of Israelites, thus finally destroying 
the national existence of the ten tribes, just sixty-five years 
after Isaiah's prediction to Ahaz, that before that interval had 
elapsed, "Ephraim should be broken and be no more a 
people." He also carried captive Manasseh king of Judah, 
who was however subsequently restored. 

And then lastly, in the days of Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar, 
king of Babylon, came against Judah, and made that king his 
tributary vassal, while his son afterwards became his captive. 
The story is given in full in 2 Kings xxiv. We read that, — 

" Jehoiachin went out to the king of Babylon, he, and his 
mother, and his servants, and his princes, and his officers : and 
the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of his reign. 
And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all 
the "mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all 
the craftsmen and smiths : those carried he into captivity from 
Jerusalem to Babylon, none remained save the poorest sort of 
the people of the land." 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 353 

Nebuchadnezzar left the uncle of Jehoiachin — Zedekiah — ■ 
behind as his viceroy in Jerusalem ; but this deputy proving 
faithless and rebelling, he returned, besieged and took the city, 
and carried Zedekiah, with his eyes put out, captive to Babylon. 
Nebuchadnezzar's captain, Nebuzaradan, finished the work of 
destruction, burned the Temple, and broke down the walls of 
Jerusalem, carrying captive the rest of the people. This was 
the final act in the long drama, and it is said of it, " so 
Judah was carried away out of their land " (2 Kings xxv. 21). 

Now, as given in Scripture and verified by the most careful 
chronological investigations, the leading stages of this decline 
and fall of the Jewish monarchy were as follows : — 

B.C. 

1. The invasion of Pul, following Menahem's 

accession in . . . . .770 

2. The siege and fall of Samaria . . .723 

3. The captivity of Manasseh and deportation 

by Esarhaddon . . . . .676 

4. Final fall of the throne of Judah . . 602-598 

The invasion of Pul is probably to be assigned to the first half 
of Menahem's reign, the duration of which was ten years. 

We have therefore first, in general, the era from B.C. 770 to 
B.C. 598, a period of one hundred and seventy-two years, as a 
" time of the end," a period conspicuously including all the 
main stages of the decline and fall of the Jewish monarchy, as 
well as those of the rise of Babylonian power. Wars and re- 
verses had before been experienced by the Jewish nation ; but 
it had never previously been subdued and carried captive as it 
was during this period. And the fall was final. A restoration 
was indeed enjoyed by two of the twelve tribes, but it was only 
partial and temporary ; the temple was rebuilt, but not in its 
former glory ; the city was restored, but never to independent 
sovereignty ; and after " seventy weeks " of such restoration, a 
worse flood of desolation than ever, overtook both city, temple, 
and people, from which they have never yet rallied. The 168^ 
172 years ending with Nebuchadnezzar's capture of Jerusalem^ 

A A 



354 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

was emphatically the era of departing glory, the time when 
Lo Ammi was inscribed on the brow of the daughter of Zion. 
And in this critical era four epochs of special crisis stand promi- 
nently out, as we have seen, connected with the four con- 
querors, Pul, Shalmanezer, Esarhaddon, and Nebuchadnezzar, 
the years B.C. 770-766, B.C. 723, b.c. 676, and B.C. 602-598. 
The first three have relation mainly to the kingdom of 
Ephraim or the ten tribes, the last to the kingdom of Judah 
or the two tribes. 

Now, if " seven times " be the appointed duration of the 
" Times of the Gentiles " we may expect to find, after an 
interval of 2520 years from this Jezuish captivity era a corre- 
sponding " time of the end," a period of similar decline and fall, 
overthrow and decadence, of the last form or forms of Gentile 
riding power, ushering in the close of the dispensation, the 
restoration of Israel, and the kingdom of Messiah the Son or 
David. 

And this latter ' decline and fall, like the former, will take 
place, in all probability, under judgment from God, on account 
of long-continued and terrible sin. Just as the patriarchal 
" seven times " died out amid the plagues of Egypt, and with 
the overthrow of the Red sea; and as the Jewish "seven 
times " expired amid the blood and the flames of Titus' siege 
and sack of Jerusalem ; so the Gentile " seven times " is 
destined as the Apocalypse reveals, to come to an end under 
the outpouring of the " seven golden vials full of the wrath 
of God,' ; against the sins of apostate Christendom. 

A very simple arithmetical calculation shows that 2520 
years from this Captivity era brings us to the epoch a.d. 
1 751—5 — a.d. 1 91 9-1 923,* and we inquire, Has this period 
of 168-172 years, as far as it has elapsed, had any such cha- 
racter ? And further, Have there occurred in its course any 
years marked by such events as to be unmistakable crises in the 
process of decay and destruction ? And if so, do such years 

* One year has to be subtracted in adding a.d. to b.c. periods. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 355 

correspond as closing termini with the critical years of the 
Captivity Jewish period at an interval of 2520 years or " seven 
times " ? 

The answer to these questions is full of solemn interest and 
importance, nor is it hard to find. In seeking it we have not 
to take into account all the empires and kingdoms of the 
world. The range is limited by the prophecy itself. 

Gentile supremacy over Israel has been confined to one line. 
The Chinese and the Americans never conquered Judea, nor 
held Jerusalem. They never defiled the sanctuary and per- 
secuted the Israel of God, either literal or spiritual. The line 
of Gentile powers who have done both, is distinctly defined in 
the two fourfold visions in Daniel, the image, and the four 
beasts, in which were symbolised the succession of the Baby- 
lonian, the Medo-Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman 
Empires. The three former having passed entirely away, our 
search is confined to the limits of the fourth of these. 

That fourth, or Roman monarchy, was foretold as existing 
in two states — an earlier undivided, and a later divided one. 
The former of these has passed away, equally with the Baby- 
lonian, Persian, and Grecian empires. Our search is therefore 
confined to the time and sphere, occupied by the kingdoms which 
rose out of the ruins of the old Pagan Roman Empire. Two 
politico-religious powers or dynasties, symbolised as "little 
horns," are represented as rising up and wielding supremacy 
among these kingdoms \ these little horns, — the Papal and 
Mohammedan powers, — constitute therefore the last leading 
phase of Gentile power contemplated in the prophecy ; both 
oppose God and his saints, defile his sanctuary, and tread down 
the holy city, spiritual or literal. 

The question before us is therefore reduced to narrow limits. 
Only in the history of these two powers need we look for the 
answer; and in judging of the character and relative import- 
ance of events in their history, we must compare them, not 
with events in the history of other powers, or other parts 
of the world, but only with other events in the history cf these 
powers. 



356 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Unless this is borne in mind, it is impossible rightly to es- 
timate the historical incidents, which must past under review 
in connection with this question. Again we ask then, Has the 
168 years between a.d. 1755 and a.d. 1923, or rather that por- 
tion of it which has elapsed, been, in any remarkable and 
undeniable sense, a period of decadence and overthrow to the once 
mighty Papal and Mohammedan powers ? 

Historians would with one voice reply, Beyond all question, 
it has ! But as all are not familiar with the facts of modern 
history, and as many who are, have never considered them in 
tms connection, it is needful to recall some leading events in 
the recent history of Popery and Mohammedanism. 

France — ever since the conversion of Clovis, and the dona- 
tions of Pepin and Charlemagne, had taken rank as the first of 
Papal nations, and her king as Eldest Son of the Church. France 
— long foremost in her persecutions of heretics, — had taken a 
leading place in her opposition to the glorious Reformation ; 
by the iron heel of power, she had crushed down the new life 
and had extinguished the rekindled Gospel light of that glad era. 
In the massacre of St. Bartholomew she had all but extirpated 
Protestantism ; and by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 
she had banished from her shores her surviving Huguenot 
subjects. Papist to the core, France was for more than a 
thousand years, a main pillar of the Popedom in Europe. 

The middle of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of 
a marvellous change in France. In less than half a century 
from 1750, this first of Papal nations had become madly and 
violently anti-papal; and this most servilely superstitious 
people, had become openly and even fiercely infidel.* 



# Voltaire's influence was at its height about the middle of the eighteenth 
century, i.e., just at the beginning of the period in question. 

Speaking of Voltaire, Vinet says, " A partir de Van A.D. 1 750, il fut 
encore le plus populaire et le plus puissant des ecrivains. ... La 
seconde partie du dix-huitieme siecle leur dut un caractere, ou Voltaire ne 
reconnut pas toujours celui de ses opinions personnelles, ni l'impulsion de 
son esprit. . . . Lorsque nous comparons la premiere moitie du 
siecle que nous occupe, avec l'epoque de Louis XIV, il nous semble d'^ja 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 357 

The great apostle and arch-priest of French infidelity, Vol- 
taire, was in the height of his influence at this period. With 
the aid of his associate Deistic and Atheistic philosophers, 
he was deluging France with clever, anti-monarchical, anti- 
ecclesiastical writings, of the most audacious and blasphemous 
character. These men enlisted talent and science for the 
attack, employed the keen shafts of ridicule, and appealed to 
all the evil democratic and licentious passions. They held up 
to hatred and contempt, the apostate and corrupt form of 
religion with which alone the French were familiar, and with 
fanatical zeal sought to overthrow all its power over the 
popular mind. Unjustly, but naturally, they visited on Chris- 
tianity all the falsehoods, absurdities, hypocrisies, immoralities, 
cruelties, and manifold wickednesses of Popery. " Ecrasez 
l'infame ! " (crush the wretch !) was their modern version of 
" Crucify Him ! " and their avowed object was to bring about 
the utter rejection of revealed religion. 

They succeeded only too well ! France ceased to be 
Catholic, and became — infidel; and infidel France, having 
thrown off all restraints of law and order, natural and Divine, 
plunged, before the end of the century, into the maddest 
excesses of revolution and crime. 

In 1793 came to its crisis that tremendous, unparalleled, 
irresistible movement, which put an end at once to absolute 
monarchy, aristocracy, and to ecclesiastical power in France, 
and which communicated to the neighbouring nations of 

qu'on se trouve un plein dix-huitieme siecle. Mais quand on passe a la 
seconde moitie de cette grande periode, on sent que la premiere n'etait 
que le prologue, l'exposition du drame. L'explosion n'a pas encore eu 
lieu." — Vinet, "La Litterature Francaise au XVIIP Siecle," p. 63. 

"Voltaire — c'est pour le coup le dix-huitieme siecle personifie ; sa vie 
meme est partagee comme cette grande periode." 

ti L , an 1750, ou plutot 1746, marque le point essentiel dans la carriere 
et dans la direction du siecle " (p. 64). 

" De Van 1750 a Van 1780, epoque ou la publication complete de 1'ou- 
vrage de Raynal, est comme le dernier eclat d'une incendie, a qui rien ne 
reste a devorer " (p. 74). 

The middle of the 18th century is thus regarded by historians as the era 
of the rise of the French Revolution. 



353 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

Europe the shocks of revolution, and the fierce fires of demo- 
cracy, together with an anti-ecclesiastical mania that has never 
since been allayed. 

The French Revolution is by common consent regarded as 
tue commencement of a new era, for the nations of Europe ; 
but it is not always remembered that the proximate cause of 
the French Revolution, the infidelity of the nation, dates from a 
generation earlier. That Revolution could never have assumed 
the character it did, had not the French people previously lost 
all fear of God, and all respect for man ; had not the national 
mind been blinded, and the national heart hardened, against 
all claims human and Divine, by the pernicious teachings of 
the infidel philosophers. 

It is needless to give details of that Revolution here, our 
readers will mostly be familiar with the tragic facts. How the 
infidel democracy suddenly uprose in its might, destroyed the 
Bastile, issued its declaration of the rights of man ; assaulted 
the king and queen by night, at Versailles, and murdering 
some of their body guard, forced them to proceed as prisoners 
to Paris, the bloody heads carried on pikes before the royal 
carriage. How the people confiscated all the vast revenues of 
the Church, all the domains of the Crown, and all the estates of 
refugee nobles, for the use of the State ; subjected to themselves 
all ecclesiastical, civil, and judicial power throughout the 
country ; murdered the royal guard, and some five thousand 
leading Royalists ; dethroned, imprisoned, tried, condemned, 
and murdered the king, and then the queen; declared war 
against all kings, and sympathy with all revolutionists every- 
where ; how the " reign of terror " witnessed the slaughter of 
one million and twenty-two thousand persons, of all ranks and 
ages, and of both sexes, till the streets of Paris ran with blood, 
and the guillotines could not overtake their work. How 
thousands were mowed down by grape-shot fusilades ; drowned 
in " noyades," where, in loaded vessels, hundreds of victims 
were purposely sunk in the rivers ; roasted alive in heated 
ovens, or tortured to death by other infernal cruelties. How 



THE LA IV OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 359 

Christianity was publicly renounced, and a prostitute en- 
throned as " goddess of reason " at Notre Dame, and wor- 
shipped by the National Convention and by the mob of Paris, 
with the wildest orgies of licentiousness (morality as well as 
mercy having perished with religion) ; how the most horrid 
mockery of the solemn rites of Christianity, was publicly 
enacted, an ass being made to drink the sacramental wine ; 
how the Sabbath itself was abolished, and the decade substi- 
tuted for the week ; and how hundreds and thousands of 
priests were massacred or driven into exile, and the churches 
and cathedrals turned into stables and barracks. Taken as a 
whole, the French Revolution was a convulsion, in which the 
angry passions of men, set free from all restraint, manifested 
themselves, with a force and fury unprecedented in the history 
of the world, against monarchical, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, and 
religious institutions. 

Let these things be considered in the light of a mighty and 
successful revolt against, and overthrow of, absolute monarchical 
power, and Papal tyranny and usurpation, and it will at once 
be granted that nothing similar had ever occurred previously \ in 
the history of the fourth great Empire. 

Terribly iniquitous had been the career of the monarchical 
power thus rudely overthrown ; and fearfully corrupt the 
priesthood and religion thus utterly and with abhorrence 
rejected. A solemn character of retribution attaches to even 
the worst excesses of the French Revolution. The Papacy, in 
the hour of its agony, was exultingly reminded of its own 
similar cruelties against Protestants ; Papists were treated ac- 
cording to the example set by Papists of other days, and the 
worst barbarities of Revolutionary France could not out-Herod 
the previous barbarities of Papal France. 

" The more deeply and earnestly the French Revolution is considered, 
the more manifest is its pre-eminence above all the strange and terrible 
things which have come to pass on this earth. . . . Never has the world 
witnessed so exact and sublime a piece of retribution. . . If it inflicted 
enormous evil, it pre-supposed and overthrew enormous evil. ... In 
a country where every ancient institution and every time-honoured custom, 



S6o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 



disappeared in a moment, where the whole social and political system went 
down before the first stroke, where monarchy, nobility, and Church, were 
swept away almost without resistance, the whole framework of the State 
must have been rotten ; royalty, aristocracy, and priesthood must have 
grievously sinned. Where the good things of this world, birth, rank, wealth, 
fine clothes, and elegant manners, become worldly perils and worldly dis- 
advantages for a time, rank, birth, and riches must have been frightfully 
abused. The nation which abolished and proscribed Christianity, which 
dethroned religion in favour of reason, and enthroned the new goddess a,'". 
Notre Dame in the person of a harlot, must needs have been afflicted by a 
very unreasonable and very corrupt form of Christianity. The people that 
waged a war of such utter extermination with everything established, as 
to abolish the common forms of address and salutation, and the common 
mode of reckoning time, that abhorred ' you ' as a sin, and shrank from 
' Monsieur ' as an abomination, that turned the weeks into decades and 
would know the old months no more, must surely have had good reason to 
hate those old ways from which it pushed its departure into such minute and 
absurd extravagance. The demolished halls of the aristocracy, the rifled 
sepulchres of royalty, the decapitated King and Queen, the little Dauphin 
so sadly done to death, the beggared princes, the slaughtered priests and 
nobles, the sovereign guillotine, the republican marriages and the Meudon 
tannery, the couples tied together and thrown into the Loire, and the gloves 
made of men's and women's skins ; these things are most horrible ; but they 
are withal eloquent of retribution, they bespeak the solemn presence of 
Nemesis, the awful hand of an avenging power ; they bring to mind the 
horrible sins of that old France, the wretched peasants ground for ages 
beneath a weight of imposts, from which the rich and noble were free ; 
visited ever and anon with cruel famines by reason of crushing taxes, unjust 
wars, and monstrous misgovernment, and then hung up, or shot down, by 
twenties and fifties, for just complaining of starvation, and all this for 
centuries ! They call to remembrance the Protestants murdered by myriads 
in the streets of Paris, tormented for years by military dragoons in Poitou 
and Beam, and hunted like wild beasts in the Cevennes ; slaughtered and 
done to death by thousands and tens of thousands in many painful ways and 
through many painful years. . . . 

" In no work of the French Revolution is this, its retributive character, 
more strikingly and solemnly apparent than in its dealings with the Roman 
Church and Papal power. It especially became France, which, after so 
fierce a struggle, had rejected the Reformation, and perpetrated such 
enormous crimes in the process of rejection, to turn its fury against that 
veiy Roman Church on whose behalf it had been so wrathful, .... to 
abolish Roman Catholic worship as she had abolished the Protestant wor- 
ship ; to massacre multitudes of priests in the streets of her great towns ; 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 361 

to hunt them down through her length and breadth, and to cast them by 
thousands upon a foreign shore, just as she had slaughtered, hunted down, 
and driven into exile, hundreds of thousands of Protestants ; . . . .to 
carry the war into the Papal territories, and heap all sorts of woes and 
shames upon the defenceless Popedom. . . . The excesses of revolutionary 
France were not more the punishment than the direct result of the excesses 
of feudal, regal, and papal France. ... In one of its aspects the Revo- 
lution may be described as a reaction against the excesses, spiritual and 
religious, of the Roman Catholic reaction from Protestantism. No sooner 
had the torrent burst forth than it dashed right sgainst the Roman Church 
and Popedom. . . . The property of the Church was made over to the 
State ; the French clergy sank from a proprietary to a salaried body ; 
monks and nuns were restored to the world, the property of their orders 
being likewise gone ; Protestants were raised to full religious freedom and 
political equality ; . . . the Roman Catholic religion was soon afterwards 
formally abolished. . . . Bonaparte unsheathed the sword of France against 
the helpless Pius VI. . . . The Pontiff sank into a dependant. . . . 
Berthier marched upon Rome, set up a Roman republic, and laid hands 
upon the Pope. The sovereign Pontiff was borne away to the camp of the 
infidels .... from prison to prison, and finally carried captive into 
France. Here .... he breathed his last, at Valence, in the land where 
his priests had been slain, where his power was broken, and his name and 
office were a mockery and byword, and in the keeping of the rude soldiers of 
the unbelieving Commonwealth which had for ten years held to his lips a 
cup of such manifold and exceeding bitterness. ... It was a sublime and 
perfect piece of retribution, which so amazed the world at the end of the 
1 8th century ; this proscription of the Roman Church by that very French 
nation that had slaughtered myriads of Protestants at her bidding ; this 
mournful end of the Sovereign Pontiff, in that very Dauphine, so conse- 
crated by the struggles and sufferings of the Protestants, and near those 
Alpine valleys where the Waldenses had been so ruthlessly hunted down 
by French soldiers ; this transformation of the ' States of the Church ' 
into the ' Roman Republic,' and this overthrow of the territorial Popedom 
by that very French nation, which just one thousand years ago, had, under 
Pepin and Charlemagne, conferred these territories. Multitudes imagined 
that the Papacy was at the point of death, and asked, Would Pius the Sixth 
be the last Pontiff? and if the close of the 18th century would be signalized 
by the fall of the Papal dynasty. But the French Revolution was the begin- 
ning, and not the end of the judgment ; France had but begun to execute the 
doom, a doom sure and inevitable, but long and lingering, to be diversified 
by many strange incidents, and now and then by a semblance of escape, a 
doom to be protracted through much pain and much ignominy." * . . 

* " The Papal Drama," Book x. By Thomas Ii. Gill. 



362 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 



The career of Napoleon, — the second phase of the French 
Revolution, — was a further, and even more illustrious, stage in 
the fall of the Papacy. He made open war against Pius VI., 
and compelled him to sign that most humiliating treaty of 
Tolentino, by which Ferrara, Bologna, and Romagna ("Peter's 
patrimony") were ceded to France, with an indemnity of a 
million and a half pounds, and a hundred of the finest pictures 
and statues in the Vatican. Berthier, a general of the French 
Republic, soon after took Pius VI. prisoner ; the tricolor flag 
was displayed from the Capitol, and the Pope's temporal 
power declared to be at an end. He was carried captive to 
France, where, in 1799, he died in exile. 

When Napoleon, for political reasons, restored the Roman 
Catholic religion in France, it was only to inflict on it, what its 
own dignitaries deem, additional insult and injury. It was 
put on a level with all other sects of religion, and merely 
tolerated. 

No trace of an admission of Papal supremacy, or even of 
Papal influence, is to be found in the concordat between 
Napoleon and the Pope for France, in 1801, or in that for 
Italy, in 1803. At his coronation, in 1804, Napoleon required 
the Pope's attendance, and made Pius VII. cross the Alps in 
mid-winter, not to confer a crown, but merely to adorn a 
ceremony. Napoleon placed the crown on his own head him- 
self; and the Pope stood by, "an important and imposing, but 
purposely slighted witness of the coronation.'' Napoleon did 
not at that time wish to annihilate the Popedom, as the revolu- 
tionary Directory had done, but to retain the Sovereign Pontiff 
as his vassal. But when, a few years later, the Pope resisted his 
will, he soon showed him who was master. In 1809, in the 
plenitude of his power, when he was supreme in Europe, he 
issued from the palace of the Schonbrunn in Vienna, a decree 
dividing and distributing the dominions yet remaining to the 
Pope in Italy, and constituting Rome itself the second city 
in the French Empire. At the same time he reduced the 
"Holy Father " to the rank of a French subject, and even 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 363 

in his sacerdotal character, a mere salaried official of the 
French Court, his income being fixed at ^80,000 a year. 

The bull of excommunication which the Pope fulminated 
against Napoleon in return, only made him ridiculous in the 
eyes of Europe ; like his predecessor, he was carried captive 
by the French army, first to Savona, then to Fontainebleau, 
where he was forced to sign another concordat, renouncing all 
claim to Rome for ever. 

On the overthrow of Napoleon, the Pope was restored to 
Rome ; " but he sat not on his throne as once before ; his 
power was crippled, his seat unstable, the riches of his Church 
were rifled, and a mighty precedent and principle of action 
had been established against him, which could scarcely fail of 
bearing similarly bitter fruit afterwards." (Elliott, " Horse," hi. 

P. 375-) 

The restoration of Papal supremacy in France did not last 
long. The year 1830 brought about another thoroughly anti- 
sacerdotal revolution. Charles X., who had acceded to the 
throne in 1824, had to abdicate, and his ministry had to flee 
for their lives ; while the Duke of Orleans was proclaimed 
king under the title of Louis Philippe. 

In 1848 another revolution again constituted France a 
republic ; tumults broke out in Paris in February, the Tuileries 
were ransacked, and frightful disorders committed. Louis 
Philippe was obliged to abdicate and take refuge in England ; 
and " the second republic " was proclaimed. A fortnight after 
the fall of Louis Philippe, the constitution was proclaimed in 
Rome, and the city and country were thrown into a state of 
revolution. 

Before the end of the year Count Rossi, the Pope's prime 
minister, was killed, and the Pope had to flee from Rome. He 
was deposed from his temporal authority, and an Italian re- 
public was proclaimed. It was only by the power of the 
French that the Pope was afterwards for a time restored, when 
Louis Napoleon had become President of the French Republic. 
With occasional pauses, and with gleams of passing prosperity 



364 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

now and then, the course of the Papacy has ever since been one 
of downfall and decay. It is not needful here to recall the 
details of the consuming process that has during the last forty 
or fifty years been going on ; but recent events must receive a 
brief notice. In 1866 the Romish Empire of Austria was worsted 
by Protestant Prussia at the memorable battle of Sadowa, a 
battle the results of which were as decisive as those of Waterloo. 
Austria received a shock from which it has never recovered, 
and was obliged to cede Venetia, which was annexed to the 
kingdom of Italy, while Prussia was raised to the rank of one of 
the great powers of Europe. In 1868, the Spanish Revolution 
took place, Queen Isabella fled, and Spain was plunged into 
years of cruel strife, in the course of which the Jesuits were 
banished, their monasteries and churches confiscated and sold 
or pulled down, and the bones of the martyrs brought to light 
at the Quemadero. 

The same year Pius IX. sent out his famous encyclical 
letter summoning the (Ecumenical Council for 1870. Six 
archbishop princes, 49 cardinals, n patriarchs, 680 arch T 
bishops and bishops, 28 abbots, 29 generals of orders, 803 
spiritual rulers, representing the Church of Rome throughout 
the world, solemnly decreed the dogma that the occupant of 
the Papal Chair, is, in all his decisions regarding faith and 
morals, infallible ! It is said that arrangements had been made 
to reflect a glory around the person of the Pope by means of 
mirrors at noon, when the decree was made (18 July, 1870). 
But the sun shone not that day. A violent storm broke over 
Rome, the sky was darkened by tempest, and the voices of the 
Council were lost in the rolling of thunder. 

On the very day following this culmination of Papal arrogance 
and self-exaltation, was declared that terrible Franco-German 
war, in which the French Empire of Louis Napoleon, — by the 
soldiers of which the Pope was maintained on his tottering 
throne, — -fell. The temporal sovereignty of the Papacy fell with 
it. No sooner had the French troops been withdrawn from 
Rome, and the French Empire collapsed, than the Italian 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 365 

Government announced its intention of entering the Roman 
States, and did so. On the 20th of September, 1870, Rome 
was declared the capital of the kingdom of Italy, and be- 
came the residence and the seat of the government of Victor 
Emmanuel. The Times' summary for that year says, " The most 
remarkable circumstance in the annexation of Rome and its ter- 
ritory to the kingdom of Italy, is the languid indifference with 
which the transfer has been regarded by Catholic Christendom. 
A change which would once have convulsed the world has 
failed to distract attention from the more absorbing spectacle 
of the Franco-German war. Within the same year, the Papacy 
has assumed the highest spiritual exaltation to which it could 
aspire, and lost the temporal sovereignty which it had held for a 
thousand years." 

Taking these and similar facts into consideration, there can 
be no question that the years which have elapsed since 1755, 
have been years of conspicuous, unprecedented, fatal calamity 
to the papal power. 

It has been the period of the outpouring of the vials of the 
wrath of God, to use the striking symbol of the Apocalypse, 
for the closing judgments of the dispensation. Those vial- 
plagues (Rev. xvi.), comprising "a noisome and grievous 
sore " or boil, darkness, frogs, and blood-changed rivers, cannot 
fail to recall the similar plagues sent upon Egypt prior to the 
Exodus and to the destruction of Pharaoh. Then they were 
literal, in harmony with a typical dispensation ; now they are 
the antitypical realities, of which boils, darkness, etc., are the 
symbols. But so appropriate and graphic are the symbols, so 
suggestive of the things, that under their guidance alone, we 
might have been led to discover the events we have been con- 
sidering. The infidelity of the middle of the 18th century, 
and its fearful fruit in the enormities of the French Revolution, 
have long been recognised as the judgment symbolised by the 
eruption of the " noisome and grievous sore on the men that 
had the mark of the beast, and worshipped his image,' ; that 
is on the inhabitants of papal Christendom. Such an outbreak 



366 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

in the natural body is a mark of deep-seated impurity and 
disease in the constitution. In the body politic the eruption 
of violent moral and social evil is the same, an indication of 
long-continued and all-pervading irrehgion and corruption. 

The second, third, fourth, and fifth vials predict, under various 
symbols, the judgments connected with the Napoleonic and 
anti-Papal wars which followed the French Revolution ; the 
outpouring of the sixth, brings us to the other event we are 
seeking, the decline and fall of the Mohammedan power. 

The years which have elapsed since the middle of the 18th 
century have been almost as fatal to the Eastern, as to the 
Western little horn. We have not yet seen the complete ex- 
tinction of the political power of the Sultan, as we have that of 
the Pope ; but it is already almost annihilated in Europe ; 
crippled and restricted where it still exists ; and events, as well 
as Scripture prophecy indicate, that its hold over Syria cannot 
last much longer. 

The rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire are symbolised in 
the Apocalypse, by the overflow and drying up of the great 
river Euphrates. In other parts of Scripture the overflow of a 
river is, from its peculiar appropriateness, used as a symbol for 
the invasion of a land by a foreign conqueror. (See Jer. xlvi. 
7 ; Isa. viii. 7, 8.) A modern " History of the Ottoman Turks'''* 
opens with the following sentence. " Six centuries ago a pas- 
toral band of four hundred Turkish families was journeying 
westward, from the upper streams of the river Eiphrates : their 
armed force consisted of four hundred and forty-four horsemen, 
and their leader's name was Ertoghrul." This little band of 
Euphratean horsemen, were the ancestors of that terrible host 
or " army of horsemen two hundred thousand thousand" strong, 
whom the Seer of Patmos beheld, loosed from the Euphrates, 
and overflowing the Roman earth, carrying distress and death 
wherever they went — the " second woe " sent by God as a 
judgment on Christendom for its depravity and i- postasy, the 
first having been the Saracenic. 

* By Sir Edward S. Creasy, M.A. London : Bentley, 1877. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 367 

History tells us how this Euphratean flood covered land 
after land, with its irresistible advance. All over South-Eastern 
Europe, as far as Venice, the Turkish flood extended. Wherever 
it reached it carried misery and death, so that even the strong 
language of Rev. ix. 17 can barely convey an idea of the " woe " 
it was to Eastern Christendom. 

The " drying up " of this flood, that is to say the liberation 
from Turkish oppressions., of the Christian nations and lands 
overwhelmed by it, began with the Greek rebellion in 1820. But 
fatal blows to the power and prestige of the Ottoman Empire, had 
previously been dealt by Russia. In the war of 1768 between 
the two kingdoms, the Turkish armies were beaten and de- 
stroyed, and ruin and disgrace attended each succeeding cam- 
paign. In 1770 the Russian admiral annihilated the Turkish fleet 
in the iEgean sea. In 1774a large Turkish army was again most 
disgracefully beaten, and the humiliating peace of Kainarge, 
showed that the conqueror was in a position to dictate terms. 
Three years later, war again broke out between the two powers, 
and again the Russians had the mastery both by sea and by 
land, and obtained the cession of important towns and districts 
before concluding peace. In 1806 Russia occupied Moldavia 
and Waliachia, and the old hostility broke out afresh, the 
weakness of the Ottoman Empire becoming more apparent than 
ever. A new fleet, which had been created, was destroyed by 
the Russians at Lemnos. Mahmoud II. had to buy a peace, 
by the cession of all his territory north of the Pruth, of a 
number of fortresses on the Danube, and of a principal mouth 
of the Danube itself. In 1820 began a formidable insurrection 
in Greece, the finest province of the Turkish Empire, which 
quickly spread to Waliachia, Moldavia, and the ^Egean Isles. 

In 1826 the Porte surrendered to the Russians all the 
fortresses it retained in Asia ; in the same year civil commo- 
tions distracted Constantinople ; and the awful slaughter of 
the Janissaries took place, 4000 soldiers being shot or 
burned to death in their own barracks in the city, and many 
thousands more all over the empire, by the Sultan's own com- 
mand. 



368 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 



The Greek rebellion continued till 1827, when, after a severe 
and prolonged struggle, Turkey was obliged to acknowledge 
the independence of Greece. The sympathies of Western 
Christendom had been aroused by the horrible cruelties per- 
petrated by the Turkish Admiral, in the conquest of Scio ; and 
England, France, and Russia intervened between the Porte 
and its Greek Christian subjects. At the great naval battle of 
Navarino, the fleet of Turkey was once more destroyed, and 
Greece became independent. 

In 1829 the freedom of Servia was similarly secured by 
a treaty which forbade a single Turk to reside north of the 
Danube ; and the same year the Turkish province of Algeria 
in Africa became a French colony. 

Mehemet Ali, the powerful Pacha 01 Egypt, who had long 
been aiming at an hereditary kingdom for himself, rebelled 
against his master, and asserted his independence in 1832. 
He attacked and conquered Syria, and defeated the Turkish 
armies in three great battles. Nothing but the interference 
of the great powers of Christendom, at that time prevented 
his marching on Constantinople, and overthrowing the Sultan 
altogether. He was forced back into his own province, and 
made again nominally dependent on the Sultan by payment ot 
an annual tribute, and the furnishing certain military aid when 
asked. But Egypt is virtually independent of the Porte, and 
her present ruler has assumed the title of Khedive, or king, in 
recognition of the fact. 

In 1844 the Porte was compelled, under threat of European 
interference, to issue an edict of religious toleration, abolishing 
for ever its characteristic and sanguinary practice of execution 
for apostasy (i.e., for the adoption of Christianity). This com- 
pulsory sheathing of its persecuting sword was a patent proof 
that its independence was gone, and a marked era in its over- 
throw. 

Nor has it been under the judgment of the sword alone, that 
the Ottoman Empire has been sinking to decay. It is miser- 
ably perishing in its own corruption. Internal discord and 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 369 

insurrection, proyoked by cruel tyranny and monstrous mis- 
government, have weakened the State. Polygamy and other 
vices have caused a depopulation so rapid as to be almost in- 
credible. Pestilence, conflagration, earthquakes, civil com- 
motions, massacres, slaughters, all have tended to reduce the 
population and weaken the empire. These attacks from without, 
rebellions from within, and this steady process of internal decay, 
have reduced Turkey, not only to financial bankruptcy, but to 
such a state of weakness, that, but for the policy of England 
and other European States, she must long since have perished. 
The notion that " the integrity of the Ottoman Empire " must 
be maintained in order to resist the encroachments of Russia, 
has for the last fifty years averted from this decaying power, 
long impending and richly deserved doom. But even this can 
avert it no longer. The atrocious cruelties and fiendish bar- 
barities of the Turk, have alienated from him the sympathies 
and even the compassions of Christendom ; and in the recent 
war no hand has been upraised to avert the fate impending 
over the blood-guilty Ottoman Empire. Russia has this time 
all but accomplished the task, on which she has so long had 
her heart set — the liberation from Moslem tyranny of the Chris- 
tians of South-Eastern Europe. If foreign interference should 
again avert the end (as it did in the case of the temporal 
power of the Pope), it can only be for a time. Forces are at 
work which must ere long destroy the foul tyranny which has 
so long ruined the fairest regions of the earth ; and must set, 
not Europe only, but Palestine, free from the Moslem rule. 

The period that has elapsed since the middle of the 18 th 
century, corresponding to the Jewish Captivity period, and 
closing the 2520 years, or e< seven times " of Gentile supremacy, 
has then been most conspicuously marked by the decline and fall 
of the two little horns, the final forms of Gentile rule over the 
Israel, and Sanctuary of God, spiritual and literal. 

And the years of special crisis in the former have been, as 
far as we have gone, answered by corresponding years of crisis 
in the latter, as will be seen by the following table. We 

B B 



37o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

have not yet reached the latest terminus ad quem ; it is not 
yet 2520 years since the final fall of the throne of David, and 
the full establishment of Gentile supremacy by Nebuchad- 
nezzar's overthrow of Jehoiakin ; nor have the events pre- 
dicted as to close this time of the end all taken place as 
yet. 

We do not wish to speculate as to the future ; of that, as the 
great Sir Isaac Newton said, " let time be the interpreter." 
We simply point to facts in the past. No one can question 
that the sudden and terrible outbreak of infidelity and atheism 
in the middle of the last century, marked by the publications 
of Rousseau and the Encyclopedists — the accession of the ill- 
fated king and queen who fell victims to the fury of the French 
revolution ; the culmination of that awful movement itself in 
the reign of terror, followed by the overthrow of the Papal 
power in Italy; and, turning to the East, the compulsory 
signature by the Sultan of the first edict of religious toleration — 
no one can question we say, that these have been marked and 
critical events , in the downfall of the Papal and Mohammedan 
powers. Other indications will shortly lead us to other dates 
also ; but we are already in a position to see that between the 
critical years of the Captivity era, and the critical years of this 
time of the end, there lie exactly "seven times," — 2520 years. 

For one such great "week," traced backwards from the 
middle of last century, takes us to the reign of Menahem, king 
of Israel and the invasion of Pul ; the same period traced back 
from the accession of Louis XVI. reaches exactly to the accession 
of Nabonassar, the first king of Babylon ; the same period traced 
back from the overthrow of the Papal power in the French 
revolution, leads up to the overthrow of Samaria by Shalmane- 
zer ; and the same period traced back from the Turkish edict 
of toleration reaches to the completion of the captivity of the 
ten tribes by Esarhaddon. A simple calculation will prove 
this, remembering that in adding a.d. to B.C. dates, one year 
has to be subtracted to obtain the complete interval elapsed. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 371 

TERMINI A QUO AND AD QUEM OF THE SEVEN TIMES. 

I. From the first Assyrian invasion of Palestine (that by Pul, king of 
Assyria), and the carrying captive a portion of the Ten Tribes, to the out- 
break of the grievous sore of infidelity, in the middle of the 18th century.* 

B.C. 77o 2520 years. AD mo _ lt 

II. From the siege and fall of Samaria and more complete captivity of 
che Ten Tribes by Shalmanezer, to the judgments on the Papal Power in 
the French Revolution — 

B.C. 723 2520 years. AD> ^ 

III. From the captivity of Manasseh and coincident completion of the 
deportation of the remainder of the Ten Tribes by Esarhaddon, to the first 
edict of religious toleration in the East, issued by the Porte, the compulsory 
sheathing of its persecuting sword, a sign that its independence was gone — 

B.C. 676-7 2520 years. AD< ^ 

IV. From the full captivity of Judah, and final overthrow of the throne 
of David, accomplished by Nebuchadnezzar, to the still future terminus 
ad qnem of the prophetic period of 2520 years. 

B.C. S98 2 520 years. A>D> IQ2 ^ 

Historically, then,, the Times of the Gentiles Is a great dis- 
pensational week, of 2520 years, extending from the Captivity 
era, B.C. 770—598, to the era of the closing judgments on the 
kingdom of the beast, the vial era of the Apocalypse, a.d. 1750- 
1923. It is the "seven times" of Gentile dominion over 
Israel, included in the symbol of Nebuchadnezzar's image. 

This great week has thus earlier and later commencements, 
incipient and then full starting points, and corresponding closes, 
just as in an eclipse, the penun-bra first comes in contact, and 
after a brief interval the dark shadow. This is clearly the case 
with other chronological prophecies also. Jeremiah announced, 



* Measured from the accession of Menahem, as the date of this invasion 
in his brief reign, is not given. 



372 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

for example, that Judah should serve the king of Babylon 
"seventy years" (Jer. xxv. n, 12). History shows that this 
period had a double commencement and a double termina- 
tion, — a two-fold fulfilment. First, from B.C. 606 to the decree 
of Cyrus, and again from B.C. 587 to the edict of Darius. This 
is easily explicable. The majestic movements of Providence 
and of history demand time ; empires do not rise and fall in a 
day ; and the omniscient God takes note of the comparatively 
insignificant beginning of a mighty movement as well as of its 
climax. We are witnesses that the decay of the Papal and 
Mohammedan powers demands an era, not an epoch merely ; 
and such has been the case with the decay of other great 
powers in other ages. Hence the propriety of indicating 
various dates of rise and fall. But it should be noted that the 
interval by which the earliest of these commencing and closing 
dates is separated from the latest is, compared to the whole period, 
so small as to be scarcely perceptible, so that it is even difficult 
to represent it to scale, on a diagram. Thus the statement that 
at the equinox the day is twelve hours long, is practically true 
of a day or two before, and of a day or two after the equinox, 
because the variatio7i is, compared to the length of the day^ 
hardly observable. 

But while the measures of this great dispensational week are 
sufficiently clear, when we consider its main termini, they be- 
come increasingly so when we proceed to study its bisections 
and divisions. The measures of the whole week are evident ; 
but those of the half week, the "time, times, and a half -' of 
prophecy, are still more so, and these we must now examine. 

The whole Week, or " seven times," dates from the era of the 
rise of the literal Babylon, and measures the entire course of the 
four great monarchies ; the half week, or " time, times, and a 
half/' dates from the era of the rise of the spiritual Babylon, 
and measures the existence of the great apostasies which oc- 
cupy the latter half of the " Times of the Gentiles.'*' When 
did these arise ? 

The Papal power rose in the interval between the fall of the 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 373 

Western Roman Empire, under Romulus Augustulus, the last 
Emperor of Rome, and the Pope-exalting decrees of the 
Eastern Emperors Justinian and Phocas, which put the topstone 
on the slowly rising arch of Papal pretension and power, by con- 
stituting the Bishops of Rome Universal Bishops, and making 
them heads of all Christendom. And the Mohammedan power 
rose in the East during the very same interval ; for, as Luther 
used to say, " the Pope and the Turk came up together." The 
fall of the Western Empire took place in a.d. 476, and th© 
Hegiraera of the Mohammedans is a.d. 622. 

The century and a half intervening between these dates may 
be called the era of the rise of. the Western and Eastern 
Apostasies. It embraces nearly all the main stages of the rise 
of the two little horns ; it is analogous in character and in 
duration to the Captivity era, and it is central in position in the 
great " seven times." 

1. It is analogous in character, for the Captivity era was one 
of decay and fall to the natural Israel, and one during which 
the power and dominion of the natural Babylon, was rising 
steadily to its culmination in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. 
This central era of the rise of the apostasies is one of decay 
and fall to the spiritual Israel, the true Church of Christ, and 
one during which the power and dominion of the spiritual 
Babylon, was rising steadily to its culmination in the enthrone- 
ment of the Papal dynasty — the great antichrist, the antitype 
of Nebuchadnezzar — at Rome. 

2. It is analogous also in duration, for from the era of 
Nabonassar to the overthrow of Jehoiakim is 146 solar, or 150 
lunar, years, and from the fall of the Western Empire of Rome 
(a.d. 476) to the date of the Hegira of Mohammed (a.d. 622) 
is exactly the same period. 

3. It is central in position in the great " seven times." The 
intervals which separate the commencement and completion of 
the Captivity era from the commencement and completion of 
this central era are respectively 1260 lunar years; and the 
intervals which separate these latter dates from the correspond- 



374 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

ing dates of the " time of the end " are also respectively 1260 
years. 

That this central era is the bisection of " seven times " has 
long been perceived in a general way by students of prophecy ; 
but it is only by the application to the period of careful astrono- 
mical measures that the wonderful accuracy and exactness with 
which this is the case can be demonstrated. 

Three sorts of years are, it must be premised, demonstrably 
employed by the Author of the prophetic periods : solar, 
calendar, and lunar years. Calendar years, or years of 360 
days, are used in the predictions of Daniel and the Apoca- 
lypse ; for it is only three and a half such years that contain 
1260 days. 

Solar and lunar years are also taken into account, as is 
proved by the fact that in Dan. xii. — 75 years are, as we have 
seen, added to 2520 ; and 75 is exactly the difference between 
2520 solar years and 2520 Iwiar years. 

We have a warrant therefore for measuring historic intervals 
by a?iy or all of these three standards ; and where, for any 
reason, it is the Divine purpose to conceal for a time, or 
partially, the actual measures of any interval, we may expect 
to find the lunar year employed in measuring it, inasmuch as 
this year gives rise to what may be termed a hidden chronology. 

Before going further, it will be well to enquire what were the 
critical years in this era of the rise of the Papal and Moham- 
medan powers. We are in the broad sunlight of authentic 
profane history here ; there may be room for some difference 
of judgment as to the relative importance of certain events in 
the history, but there can be no question at all as to the dates 
of the events selected. 

" He that letteth," or that which hindereth the development 
of the great apostasy, "will let, until he be taken out of the 
way," said the Apostle Paul, and then the antichrist will be 
revealed (2 Thess. ii.). ' There could be no chance for Popes 
while the Caesars still ruled at Rome. The first step in the 
rise of the Papacy therefore was necessarily the complete 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 375 



downfall of the Western Empire of Rome, which, as we have 
seen, took place under Romulus Augustulus, in a.d. 476. 
From that time forth the claims of the Bishops of Rome in- 
creased continually, based at first on the metropolitan cha- 
racter of the see of Rome, and by degrees on more super- 
natural and spiritual grounds. But their claims to supremacy 
over other bishops received no legal sanction until a.d. 533, 
when, by his celebrated decretal letters, the Eastern Roman 
Emperor, Justinian, recognised the Bishop of Rome as " head 
of all the holy Churches, and all the holy priests of God."* 

In the seventy-fifth subsequent year, a.d. 607, the Emperor 
Phocas promulgated another very notable decree, confirming 
the right of the Pope to the headship of all the Churches, 
Eastern as well as Western, and acknowledging him primate 
of all other sees, that of Constantinople included. In 608 
Phocas bestowed upon the Pope the Pantheon of Rome, a 
temple formerly dedicated to Cybele and all the gods, and 
thenceforth to the Virgin Mary and all the martyrs; i.e., 
formerly devoted to Pagan, and thenceforth to Papal, idolatry. 
Phocas died in a.d. 610. In 1813 the, base of a pillar was 
excavated in Rome, bearing an inscription intimating that it 
was erected in honour of Phocas, a.d. 608, on the occasion 
of these his great concessions to the Pope. 

The accession of the assassin Phocas was "joyfully " en- 
dorsed by Pope Gregory the Great, -j- whose own accession in 
a.d. 590, constitutes a very leading date in the rise of the 
Papacy. Gregory the Great was " the last of the Latin Fathers, 
and the first in the modern sense of the word of the Popes" and 
he " did more than any other to set the Church forward upon 
the new lines on which henceforth it must travel to constitute 
a Latin Christianity, with distinctive features of its own, such 
as broadly separate it from Greek."J 

* See Appendix A., Justinian's decree. 

f Gibbon, "Decline." Ch. xlvi. 

\ Archbishop Trench, " Mediaeval Church History," p. 14. 



376 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

One more remarkable step in the rise of the Papacy, and 
the extending over Europe of its peculiar evil influence, must 
be noticed. It is the decree of the Pope Vitalian, ordering 
all the services of the Church throughout Christendom to be 
read in Latin, — a decree, as we know, still in fatal force, and 
obeyed by every Roman Catholic priest in the world. This 
was in the year a.d. 663. It gave a distinctly Roman, or 
Latin, character to the Church, secured perfect unity with 
Rome in all its ceremonial, and was surely one way in which 
the beast " caused all to receive his mark and the number of 
his name " (AATEIN02 = 666). From the time of the division 
of the Roman Empire, the Western half, indeed, received the 
designation Latin, in opposition to " Greek," which, strangely 
enough, was soon applied by the Eastern Roman Emperors to 
themselves and their empire. In the West the word Roman 
was also dropped ; it was the Latin world, the Latin kingdoms, 
the Latifi Church, the Latin clergy, the Latin patriarch, the 
Latin councils. Gibbon, who is so accurate in his word-paint- 
ing, always applies this epithet to the Western Papal kingdoms. 
" ' They latinize everything,' to use Dr. More's words \ ' mass, 
prayers, hymns, litanies, canons, decretals, bulls, are conceived 
in Latin. The Papal councils speak in Latin ; the Scripture is 
read in no other language under Popery than Latin ; in short, 
all things are Latin.' " * From the time of Vitalian's decree, 
public worship itself throughout the whole of Papal Christen- 
dom was in Latin only. Hence the truth and worship of God 
became mere unmeaning sounds to the mass of the people 
in all lands, and the power of the Papal priesthood propor- 
tionably increased. 

We take then as the main epochs of the rise of the Fapai 
power — 

1. The decretal letter of Justinian 533. 

2. The accession of Gregory the Great .., ... 590. 

3. The edicts and donations of Phocas ... ...607-610. 

4. The latinizing decree of Vitalian ... ... 663. 

* Elliott, vol. iii., p. 232. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 377 

The main points or epochs in the rise of the Eastern little 
horn, the Mohammedan power, which sprang up during the 
same era, spread with extraordinary rapidity, attained enor- 
mous influence, and wielded it to the misery and destruction of 
the Christian nations subjugated by it, — are two. 

1. The Hegira, or flight of Mohammed from Mecca to 
Medina, the turning point in the career of the false prophet, 
which transformed him from the despised leader of a sect of 
fanatics to the prince and prophet of his people. 

2. The capture of Jerusalem and Syria by the Caliph Omar, 
when a mosque was erected on the site of Solomon's temple, 
from which, that Muezzin call to prayer which has never since 
ceased (save for a brief interval in the time of the Crusaders) 
was first heard in the city. It was on this occasion that 
Sophronius, the unhappy patriarch of Jerusalem, muttered as 
he followed the victorious caliph round the sacred sites, " The 
abomination of desolation stands in the holy place." 

The ten years of the Caliphate of Omar from a.d. 634 to 
a.d. 644 were years of rapid extension of Mohammedan 
power. The Saracens during their course reduced to obedience 
36,000 cities or strongholds, destroyed 4,000 Christian 
churches, and built 1,400 mosques. 

" At the end of the first century from the Hegira, the Ara- 
bian Empire had been extended to 200 days' journey from east 
to west, and reached from the confines of Tartary and India to 
the shores of the Atlantic, " over all which ample space," says 
Gibbon, " the progress of the Mohammedan religion diffused 
a general resemblance of manners and of opinions," — over all 
which ample space, we may add, the venom of the scorpion 
sting of their conquerors was made to rankle in the breast of 
the subject Christians. For, indeed, the bitter contempt and 
hatred flowing out from the Moslem faith towards them could 
not but be felt perpetually. It was marked in the terms 
" Christian dogs" and "infidels." The enactments of the capi- 
tulations granted them were their every-day remembrancers of 
it. Deprived of the use of arms, like the Helots of old, with 



378 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

a tribute enforced as their animal life redemption tax, with a 
different dress, enjoined on them from their masters, and a 
more humble mode of riding, an obligation to rise up deferen- 
tially in the presence of the meanest Moslem, and to receive 
and gratuitously entertain for a certain time any Mussulman 
who on a journey might require it, such were the marks of per- 
sonal degradation ordained in the capitulations. And then, in 
token of the degradation of their religion, — to which, notwith- 
standing all their superstitions, they clung with fond attach- 
ment — there was a prohibition to build new churches, to 
chime the bells in those retained by them, or to refuse admis- 
sion into them to the scoffing Moslem, though they regarded 
his presence as defilement. Add to which the inducements to 
apostacy, operating to an incalculable extent, on the young 
and thoughtless in families more especially, and then the 
penalty of death against their returning to the Christian faith, 
the insults, moreover, to the Christian females, and thousands 
of undefinable injuries of oppression, and how could it be but 
the bitterness of their loss should be felt, and the poison rankle 
within them, even as in other days with the Jewish captives 
in Babylon, so as to make life itself almost a burden?" * 

The two principal Mohami?iedan dates of commencement 
then are — 

i. The Hegira ... ... ... ... a.d. 622. 

2. Omar's capture of Jerusalem ... ... a.d. 637. 

Now let it be observed 

1. That from the accession of Nabonassar, the first king of 
Babylon, to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, the last 
Emperor of Rome, was to a day 1260 lunar years. f 

2. That from the overthrow of Jehoiakim by Nebuchad- 
nezzar (b.c. 602) to the Hegira of Mohammed is also 1260 
lunar years. 

3. That from Nebuchadnezzar's burning of the temple, m 

* Elliott, vol. i. , p. 424. 
t See Calendar of the Times of the Gentiles, Appendix. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 379 



the 19th year of his reign (b.c. 587), to Omar's capture of Jeru 
salem (a.d. 637), followed by the erection of a mosque that bears 
his name on the site of the temple, is again 1260 lunar years. 

4. That from the Mohammedan era of Hegira to the import- 
ant crisis in the decay and fall of Mohammedan power before 
alluded to, the end of its independence and legalised intoler- 
ance, a.d. 1844, is once more 1260 years lunar, and it should 
be remembered that the Mohammedan reckoning is lunar. 

5. That from the celebrated Pope-exalting decree of Justi- 
nian; A.D. 533, which constituted the Bishop of Rome head of 
all the Churches, 1260 years reckoned as lunar, as calendar, 
and as solar, lead respectively to the important initial, and 
crisis dates of the French revolution ; thus : — 

A.D. 533, Justinian's decretal letter 




1260 Lunar 

1260 Calendar 



*793 



6. That from the decree of the Emperor Phocas, confirm- 
ing the primacy of the see of Rome over that of Constanti- 
nople and all the Eastern and Western Churches, 1260 years 
measured in the same three ways lead respectively to the three 
great modern overthrows of Papal power of which we have 
spoken : the revolutions of 1830, 1848-9, and 1866-70. 

a.d. 607-10. Phocas — 



607--=^: 



l2 6oJ^ar____A830 

1260 Calendar „ 

-1848-9 



1866— 



1S70 



7. That measured from the important central date of the 
accession of Pope Gregory the Great, Sept. 3, a.d. 590, the 
first properly speaking of the Popes, the 1260th solar year 



38o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

commences in Sept., 1849, which year is the terminus of 1260 
cale?idar years from the decree of Phocas. 

8. That from the captivity of Jehoiachin, and the final over- 
throw of Judah, B.C. 598, 1260 solar years lead to the promul- 
gation of the decree of Vitalian that the services of the 
Church throughout Christendom should be performed in Latin, 
a.d. 66$. This latter date is, consequently, the bisection of 
"seven times" in solar years, as reckoned from the date of the 
final overthrow of the throne of Judah, and 1260 solar years 
from that point do not run out until the year a.d. 1923. 

9. Further, from the capture of Jerusalem by Omar, a.d. 
637, 1260 calendar years have brought us to the recent over- 
throw of Turkey by Russia, the Treaty of Berlin ; the Anglo- 
Turkish Convention as to Cyprus, and the English protectorate 
of Asia 'Minor, unquestionably a fresh stage in the downfall 
of the Mohammedan power, whose present head is Constanti- 
nople. We have not yet reached 1260 solar years from the 
same date; they will run out in 1897 (and 1260 solar years 
from the Hegira date, the true commencement of Moham- 
medan reckoning, will expire in 1882). 

It may be asked, How is it, if the fulfilment of these chro- 
nological prophecies be thus clearly traceable, that the fact 
has not been earlier perceived ? 

We reply, It is the revealed purpose of God that, for wise 
and gracious reasons, these chronological prophecies should 
become clear only in the "time of the end" (Dan. xii.). 

In fulfilment of this design, not only is a symbolic system of 
predicting events and their duration adopted, but even when 
the chronological symbol employed is rightly translated on the 
year-day system, it is not necessarily clear what kind of year is 
the reality, for which a day is the symbol ; hence the true length 
of the predicted period may still be to a certain extent hidden. 

Some of the above periods are accurate even to a day when 
calculated by the true lunar year, though they present only 
distant approximations to accuracy when measured by the 
solar year. 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 381 

But while comprehension of these Divine prophecies was 
impossible until partial fulfilment had given the true clue in 
the year-day system, and while the periods predicted still re- 
mained obscure even when the clue was obtained, their true 
scope has become clearer and clearer as each successive 
generation of students has searched into their meaning, till 
now, in the light of such fulfilments as the late loss of tem- 
poral power by the Papacy, and the present and imminent loss 
of power by the Ottoman Empire, — in the clear glow of light 
shed by fulfilments in this end of the age, and by the dis- 
covery of the astronomic measures of these mysterious times, 
the whole series seem to range themselves into order and pro- 
portion, and to present no longer a hopeless, puzzling, and 
intricate maze, but a complete, majestic, and clearly traceable 
plan. 

Chronological Measures of the Patriarchal Age 
and the Jewish Dispensation. 

It remains now to show that each of the two earlier dispen- 
sations lasted for a period similar to the Times of the Gentiles, 
and consisted of a great week of years of years — " seven times." 

It should be noted, that Christianity, the religious system 
which has distinctively characterized the Times of the Gentiles, 
did not take its rise at their commencement, but on the con- 
trary, when they had already run a third of their course. The 
rise of Christianity dates, not from the overthrow of Jewish 
independence in the Captivity era, but from the period of the 
abolition of Judaism, just before the fall of the city and temple 
of Jerusalem. Similarly Judaism, the distinctively character- 
istic religion of the previous or second great dispensation, dates, 
not from its commencement, but from Sinai, the giving of 
the law, the point where the Patriarchal dispensation closes. 
And just as the times of the Gentiles had an earlier com- 
mencement than Christianity, so the Jewish race and their 
special covenant privileges, had an earlier origin than the giving 
of the law. In each case a people was first prepared to 1'eceive 



382 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. • 

the new system of religious truth, and then the system was 
revealed. Thus, as represented in the diagram, the dispensa- 
tions overlapped ; the second grew out of the first, and the 
third out of the second. The earliest date of the origin of the 
third, is, as we have seen, the beginning of the Jewish Cap- 
tivities, the invasion of Pul, in the reign of Menahem, .whose 
accession was in B.C. 770, 840 years before the destruction of 
Jerusalem, followed by the triumph of Titus, celebrated at 
Rome a.d. 70-71. Now 840 years is one-third of 2520 years ; 
the times of the Gentiles took their rise one- third of " seven 
times," before the passing away of Judaism. We naturally 
inquire, Is any parallel fact observable in connection with the 
previous dispensation ? Did the origin of the Abrahamic race 
precede the giving of the Law, by any such period ? 

The call of Abram preceded the Exodus by 430 years : " the 
covenant, that was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, 
which was 430 years after, cannot disannul, that it should make 
the promise of none effect" (Gal. hi. 17). The birth of the 
Patriarch preceded his call by seventy-five years, and Abram 
-the Hebrew was himself descended, through Eber, from Shem, 
and with his race, inherited the blessing of that pre-eminently 
blessed son of Noah ; his was the specially privileged branch 
of the 'great Shemitic family. Now the blessing of Shem im- 
mediately followed the flood ; it dates from the recommencement 
of human history after the first great judgment of the world 
by water. Measuring, then, the Shemitic dispensation, or that 
of the Jewish people and their fathers, from this primary epoch, 
to the time of Messiah's advent and rejection, we find that 
another great " seven times " intervened ; that, as nearly as we 
can ascertain, such a week of years of years, divided these great 
termini from each other. 

It must be borne in mind, that the two inevitable gaps in 
the world's chronology, occur in the course of this Shemitic or 
Jewish age, so that certainty, to within forty or fifty years, is 
unattainable. The date of the flood is a.m. 1656, which, accord- 
ing to Clinton's chronology is B.C. 2482. Adding twenty-nine 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 383 

years — to the date of the Crucifixion, — it will be seen that the 
latter event took place 2510 years after the flood, that is, only 
ten years less than the full " seven times," or 2520 years. 
Now it must be borne in mind that their rejection of Messiah 
the Prince, did not, as we have seen, cause at once, the full and 
final rejection of Israel by God. For some years subsequently 
the ministry of the Holy Ghost by the Apostles, appealed to them 
to repent and be converted, that the times of refreshing might 
come from the presence of the Lord. Ten or fifteen years later 
the sentence was pronounced by Paul and Barnabas, " It was 
necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken 
to you : but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves 
unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For 
so hath the Lord commandeth us " (Acts xiii. 46). Allowing 
therefore a few years for this final hovering of the Spirit of 
mercy and longsuffering over the guilty race, we may say that 
2520 years, "seven times," elapsed between the bestowment of 
distinctive privilege on the race of Shem, and the utter rejection 
of the Jewish people, and transference of the kingdom of God 
to the Gentiles. It should be remembered that this is no 
question of brief periods ; it is a question of a period of over 
twenty-five centuries ; so that an inaccuracy of two or three 
years, even if it existed, would scarcely affect the conclusion. 

But it cannot be proved that there is an inaccuracy, because 
of the acknowledged and inevitable uncertainty as to two of 
the minor intervals composing this long period, which may 
throw our accepted dates out, to the extent of forty or fifty 
years. Absolute accuracy is in this case unattainable; the 
terminal event of the Shemitic or Jewish " seven times " may 
have been the Crucifixion itself, or it may have been the crisis 
indicated above, or it may have been the subsequent destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem. There is no need to fix on any one of these, 
in order to recognise the broad fact, which is beyond dispute, 
that the Shemitic or Jewish age extended over a great week of 
prophetic times, exactly as does the succeeding dispensation, 
the times of the Gentiles. No trifling discrepancy of a few 



384 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

years, — a discrepancy which, as it is founded on ignorance, not 
on certain knowledge, may not exist, but be merely apparent, — 
can blind a candid observer to the fact, that here, in these 
major divisions of human history, there prevails the same law 
of completion in weeks, which we have traced in so many 
minor arrangements. 

The first, or patriarchal dispensation, had a similar duration. 
"From Ada?n to Moses" when there was " no law" i.e., from 
the Creation to Sinai, 2514 years elapsed, for the date of the 
Exodus (according to Clinton) is a.m. 2513, and the giving of 
the JLaw followed the Exodus, so that the " seven times " ter- 
minated within seven years of the Exodus. We may therefore 
boldly say that from Adam to Moses was "seven times;" 
from the incipient rise of the Hebrew nation and their 
peculiar privileges, to their utter rejection and fall, was "seven 
times;" and from the recognition by God of Gentile monarchy, 
down to its final overthrow, is also "seven times." The three 
dispensations so clearly distinguished by their broad moral fea- 
tures, and marked off by their critical termini (the greatest 
events of all human history), are three great weeks chro- 
nologically equal to each other. Taking the prophetic 
"time " (360 years) as the unit, the first contained seven such ; 
the second contained seven such ; and the third contains seven 
such. 

Symmetrical subdivisions of these great periods seem also 
clearly traceable. The second is divided into thirds, the 
last into halves. The Exodus marks the first third of the 
Shemitic or Jewish age, the Captivity era its second, and the 
fall of Jerusalem its close; the three periods representing 
respectively the rise, the prosperity, and the decay and fall, of 
the Jewish nation. The golden headship of the Babylonian 
power marks the rise of the times of the Gentiles, the first half 
of which is occupied by the four great Pagan Empires of anti- 
quity, and the last by the domination of the " little horn," or 
Papal dynasty, for "time times and a half,' ; 1260 years. The 
chronological harmony between these three great dispen- 



THE THREE DISPENSATIONS 

Patriar chal r Jewish;- Christian . 



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AND PAPACY 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 385 

sations, or stages of progress, in the providential dealings 
of God with man, is of profound interest, especially when 
viewed in relation to the other scriptural uses of the week, and 
in relation to its prominence in natural and vital phenomena. 

Owing to the ingrafting of these three dispensations, before 
mentioned, and represented in the diagram, their total duration 
is between 5880 and 6000 years. This commencement of a 
succeeding dispensation before the termination of a previous 
one, seems natural and appropriate, when the relation between 
them is remembered. Their connection is not one of mere 
succession or juxtaposition, but one of intimate relation, and of 
vital growth. The mature years of the parent coincide with the 
infancy and youth of the child ; indeed, there is always a period 
in which the lives of the mother and child are not twain, but 
one. So in the chronological arrangements of the law, one 
year began while another was still in progress, so that the two 
overlapped for several months. The year of jubilee, for 
instance, commenced in the midst of the ordinary current year, 
on the tenth day of the seventh month, the great day of 
atonement. (Lev. xxv.) 

The deep reason for this arrangement is also obvious, it 
forms part of that hidden wisdom, of which Scripture is full. 
It is one feature of an underlying system of times and seasons, 
which, like all system in nature, is concealed from mere casual 
observers. Scientific classification has its basis in natural facts ; 
but the facts on which it is based are not conspicuously obvious 
to the superficial inquirer, so that the system is not self-evident. 
On the contrary, the facts must be carefully compared, before 
their mutual relations can be perceived, or the system which 
embraces them all, discerned. So it is with these biblical 
times and seasons. The moral distinctions between the three 
dispensations are clearly pointed out in Scripture ; the great 
crises in human history which form their respective termini, are 
fully narrated, the dates of the events and their duration are 
duly given, and the measures of the last are not indistinctly 
intimated in prophecy; but it is nowhere stated that human 

c c 



386 D/VINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

history has been providentially divided into three great weeks 
of seven prophetic times each ; we are left to discover from 
what is stated, what is not stated, i.e., the plan that underlies 
the whole chronology of the Bible, and the harmony of that plan 
with the plan observable in nature, organic and inorganic. We ' 
are furnished with a clue, and then left to explore the labyrinth. 

That there should be this analogy between the mode of God's 
revelation of his ways, in nature and in Scripture, is what might 
have been expected, even were no special reason assignable 
why, in the matter of the chronology of the ages, peculiar 
reserve should be employed. But, as we have previously seen, 
the purpose of God to conceal the fore-ordained duration of 
this Christian age, from all save the later generations of his 
people, is very distinctly intimated. " Shut up the vision and 
?eal the book, even to the time of the end." " The words are 
closed up and sealed, even to the time of the end." The 
intimations which exist, of the uniform and septiform measures 
of the three dispensations, were therefore purposely slight and 
indirect, unlikely to attract attention in early days, or to be 
even surmised, till the fulfilment of the great prophetic " time 
times and a half" had so far progressed, as to illuminate with 
fresh light the entire book of chronologic prophecy. 

And further, not only is the whole plan and system an under- 
lying and half-hidden one, but even when perceived the provi- 
dential gaps in Bible chronology necessarily prevent its being 
demonstrated, with that absolute evidence which would place 
it beyond dispute, or with that accuracy which would justify 
any prediction of " that day and that hour." " It is not for 
you to knew the times and' the seasons which the Father hath 
put in his own power," said our Master to his early disciples, 
when they inquired as to the time of the restoration of the king- 
dom to Israel. He did not abate their confident expectation 
that such a restoration was to take place ; He implied, on the 
contrary, that the time and the season for it were appointed, 
but intimated that with that time and season they were not to 
become acquainted. A revelation of nineteen centuries of delay, 



THE LAW OF COMPLETION IN WEEKS. 387 

would have been a test of faith and patience too severe to be 
imposed on the infant Church : a merciful veil of mystery was 
thrown over the subject, and the return of their Lord, after a 
longer or shorter delay, was the one hope and prospect left to 
the early disciples. But ages before, the promise had been 
given, that in the time of the end, the wise should understand 
the mysteries of chronologic prophecy (Dan. xii. 10, 11) ; and 
the promise has been fulfilled. Revelations that were dark to 
the fathers, are radiant with light to us ; and the perception of 
the true nature of the year-day system, and of the septiform 
measures of the Divine dispensations, so far from discouraging 
faith and hope, jzow only stimulate both. We humbly venture 
to regard the view unfolded in this chapter, of the uniform and 
harmonious ordering of the ages of human history, by the law 
of completion in weeks, as a fresh instance of progressive inter- 
pretation, another example of the way in which God, who is 
his own interpreter, makes plain in due time, the meaning of 
his own word, 



SECTION III. 

Soli-lunar Cycles, and their Relation to the 
Chronology of History. 

CHAPTER I. 

solar and lunar supremacy 
in the ordering of terrestrial time. 

WE have already called attention to the multiplied proofs 
afforded by every branch of science, of the universal 
dominion exercised by the sun and moon, both over the 
organic and inorganic creations. 

We have shown that it is to its various relations, with these 
two vastly dissimilar, yet equally controlling bodies, that the 
earth owes its entire life and activity ; that its rotation, revolu- 
tion, heat, light, seasonal changes, magnetic impulses, and 
tidal phenomena, its winds, waves, currents, rains, snows, and 
frosts, all proceed directly or indirectly from the influence of 
the sun and moon. We have also shown that the distribution 
of vegetable and animal life, on the surface of the globe, and 
many of the laws by which both — including the development 
of the human race itself — are governed, are distinctly traceable 
to the same cause. Solar influence is simply supreme in the 
production of all terrestrial change and movement, and in the 
sustenance and regulation of all vegetable and animal life. 

We now turn to the second phase of solar and lunar domi- 
nion, and show the place of paramount importance occupied 
by these two great luminaries, in the regulation of times and 
seasons. 

The three great tasks assigned to the sun and moon in the 
first of Genesis are to rule, to give light, and to divide ; to mark 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 389 

out the boundaries that separate day from night, month from 
month, year from year, "appointed time" from "appointed 
time." The sun and moon are thus constituted not merely 
beneficent fountains of light to a dark world, and all-influential 
rulers over our globe, but also principal hands of the divinely 
constructed and divinely appointed chronometer, by which, in 
all its course, terrestrial time is measured. 

Nor does the record imply, that this chronometer is to be 
used by man alone ! " Let them be for signs and for seasons," 
or appointed times, is an expression which may legitimately 
include a fact, which it is our object in the present chapter to 
demonstrate. God, who assigned to these worlds their paths 
and their periods, has regulated all his majestic providential 
and dispensational dealings with mankind, by the greater revo- 
lutions of the same chronometer, whose lesser revolutions mark 
our days and months and years. That chronometer is adjusted 
to measure not only the blossoming of the day-lily and the 
life-time of the ephemera, but also periods which are incal- 
culable by human intelligence, and which border on infinity. 

It must be noted that the inspired narrative says " let them 
be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years," not " let 
the sun " be so, or the moon, or the sun and moon separately, 
but let them in their conjoint revolutions be such. So obvious 
and influential are the main revolutions of these " great lights " 
that in all ages men have as a matter of fact, divided time by 
their means. But this is not all, they have in addition less 
obvious cycles, which have been, as we shall see, divinely 
employed as chronological measures. 

Though time like distance, may theoretically be measured 
by comparison with standards of any length, yet practically, 
none are so convenient as those afforded by the conspicuous 
movements ot the heavenly bodies. These provide not only 
obvious and universal standards, but what is equally needful, 
varied standards. For the subdivision of comparatively brief 
periods of time, a short standard is evidently desirable, — 
for longer periods a< longer standard is required, while to 



39o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

measure periods which embrace hundreds of thousands of 
years, a standard of immense proportions is evidently needful. 
An inch is a good standard by which to divide into equal 
portions a yard, but it would be tedious to have to measure by 
inches the circumference of our globe. The distance of the 
earth from the sun may be measured by millions of miles, but 
for the almost infinitely greater distance of the fixed stars, we 
need a longer unit or standard of measurement, and find one 
in the velocity of light. 

Thus the revolution of the earth on its axis, giving rise to the 
day, is a good unit of measurement for the month or moon's 
revolution in her orbit, and the month in its turn for the year, 
or earth's revolution in its orbit. This last is a good measure 
for centuries, but when we rise to millenaries and still longer 
periods we need larger units of measurement. These are 
afforded by the revolutions of the . sun and moon, as we shall 
presently show, not by their obvious conspicuous axial and 
orbital movements merely, but by the cycles of discrepancy 
between them, and by their recurring epochs of harmony, as 
well as by their grand secular revolutions. The soli-lunar 
chronometer is adapted to measure any period, from an hour 
to an age of all but infinite extent. It has its second hand, 
its minute hand, its hour hand — its diurnal bell, its monthly 
chime, its annual peal, its secular thunder, its millennial 
choral-harmony. Man uses its minor measures, God requires 
its major standards; man counts by its days, and months, and 
years ; God's providence employs all its " appointed times/' 

" Let them be for times and for seasons." The movements 
of the sun and moon are such that naturally in most lands and 
ages, those of both, and not those of either alone, have been 
employed as measures of time. 

The solar day is of course a division of time which both the 
physical constitution of man, and his occupations, have in 
every part of the world, and in every state of society, forced 
upon him, and compelled him to adopt as his fundamental unit 
of time. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 391 

The solar year as comprising the complete revolution of the 
seasons, and thus the entire round of the operations of hus- 
bandry, forces itself similarly into observance as a larger unit 
of measurement. 

But the days of a whole year are far too numerous to admit 
of each one being distinguished by a name, and separately 
remembered and recognised. All nations have felt the neces- 
sity- of grouping the days into smaller parcels which might be 
named, and the days in each distinguished by numbers. 

The remarkably conspicuous revolution of the moon, being 
intermediate in its period between the solar day and year, has 
been adopted for this purpose, and the month, has been the 
principal measure universally recognised, between the year and 
the day. 

The marked phases of the moon, new, first quarter, full, and 
third quarter, might at first sight be supposed to have given 
rise to the fourth commonly received measure of time — the 
week. But while in a general way these phases harmonize 
with the week, they do not do so with sufficient accuracy to 
account for the use of this period, and the week evidently owes 
its origin not to any astronomical movement, but to the Divine 
institution of the'Sabbath in Eden. (Gen. ii.) 



CHAPTER II. 

DIFFICULTY OF HARMONIZING SOLAR AND LUNAR MEASURES. 

IT might have been supposed, that as solar and lunar revolu- 
tions were to be employed by man, as measures of time, 
God would have made them so harmonize, as that some definite 
number of the lesser, would be exactly commensurate with one 
of the greater, and a definite number of these again, with one 
of the greatest. We might have supposed for instance that 
thirty revolutions of the earth on its axis, would have occupied 
precisely the same time as one revolution of the moon in her 
orbit, and twelve such revolutions of the moon, precisely the 
same time, as one revolution of the earth in its orbit. 

This arrangement would have made the month exactly 
thirty days, and the year exactly twelve months. Had it been 
selected by the Creator, the great natural chronometer in the 
heavens, would have acted, as do our little artificial time-pieces ; 
its hands would, so to speak, have kept pace together, the 
second, minute, and hour hands, returning simultaneously to 
their common starting-point, at the close of every major 
revolution, and setting out again on a new round, in identically 
the same order as at first. New and full moon would have 
fallen invariably on the same day of the month, and of the 
year ; and the endless variety we now experience in this respect 
would have been replaced by perfect uniformity. 

Such a plan would have been, in some respects, convenient 
to mankind, and would have made the arrangement of the 
calendar an exceedingly simple matter, instead of as it is, a 
most complex and difficult one. But it would have been 
adapted to the measurements of short periods of time only, 
and would have afforded no standards for longer intervals. 

The arrangement actually adopted on the other hand, while 



SOU-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 393 

it creates some difficulty in the exact and uniform adjustment 
of days and months, to years, gives rise to an infinite variety of 
cycles, or circles of change and harmony, which enable the 
soli-lunar clock to measure out the revolutions of ages, by 
standards, varying in length from three years to over a thou- 
sand years. 

Of these cycles we shall have much to say presently ; and it 
must be distinctly borne in mind, that it is not in connection 
with them alone, that we employ soli-lunar reckoning, but that 
our ordinary computation of time is soM-hmar. Our calendar 
is neither purely solar — regulated by the sun alone ; nor is it 
wholly lunar — regulated by the moon alone ; but it is soli- 
lunar — regulated by both, adapted to the motions of both sun 
and moon. 

As this soli-lunar reckoning of time is fundamental to our 
present investigation, it will not be out of place to dwell a 
little more fully on the subject of 

THE CALENDAR AND ITS HISTORY. 

It is evident that one of the first cares of every civilized 
or even partially civilized society, must always have been to 
establish some uniform method of reckoning time. Without 
such a standard of reference, the administration of public affairs 
would be impossible, and even the regulation of the common 
concerns of every-day life. For the adjustment of civil and 
religious ceremonies and institutions, for the fixing of the proper 
periods for seed-time and harvest, and for the transmission to 
later generations, of the dates of events worthy of remembrance, 
a well-regulated calendar is a matter of the utmost import- 
ance. 

A moment's reflection will show the difficulty which must 
attend every attempt to construct a calendar, practically 
adapted to the wants of mankind, out of elements so inhar- 
monious as the natural day, month, and year. 

The day, measured by the revolutions of the earth on her 
axis, and marked by the apparent diurnal revolution of the 



394 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

entire heavens, — contains twenty-four hours, and is the funda- 
mental measure of time. 

The month, or interval between one new moon and another, 
occasioned by the moon's revolution in her. orbit, contains 29 
days 12 hours 44 minutes and 3 seconds. 

The year, or apparent course of the sun round the earth, 
from any given point in his orbit, to the same point again, 
occupies 12 months 10 days 21 hours, or 365 days 5 hours 
48 minutes and 49 seconds. 

How many days make a month ? How many months make 
a year ? In either case the answer involves a fractio?i y and the 
fraction involves more practical difficulty, than can be easily 
conceived by the uninitiated. 

Before observations were as accurate and information as full, 
or experience as great, as they now are, it is easy to under- 
stand that the ancients would grapple boldly with a difficulty 
which to them may have appeared slight. Twenty-nine or 30 
days to the month, and 12 months to the year, was a fair 
approximation to actual facts, and would be supposed to 
be sufficiently near the mark. But the very purposes aimed 
at in the use of a calendar, would quickly be defeated 
by the employment of so inaccurate a one as this. It 
would for a time agree pretty well with the course of the 
moon; but each year it would get more and more out of 
harmony with the true course of the sun, by eleven days. 
Now as the seasons are regulated by the course of the sun, it 
is evident that practical confusions, and irregularities of a most 
embarrassing kind, would quickly arise. For supposing it to 
have been settled at any time, that the new year should begin 
in the spring, sixteen years afterwards, new year's day would 
fall in the autumn, and in thirty-three years it would have 
worked its way all through the seasons, back to spring again. 

Intercalation, or the insertion of days at certain junctures, 
was the remedy employed to meet this difficulty ; but it was 
an uncertain, awkward, and imperfect remedy. About the 
time of the Christian era, it was felt that a reformation of the 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 395 

calendar was urgently needed. Julius Caesar, calling to his 
aid the most eminent mathematicians of his time, attempted 
the task. A careful consideration of the elements of the pro- 
blem proved, that no satisfactory solution could be found 
which did not make the sun's annual course the principal mea- 
sure and adapt to it the months and days. He therefore made 
the year to consist of 365 days for three years successively, and 
of 366 every fourth year, in order to take in the odd six hours. 

This reformation was made B.C. 45, in the year of Rome 708. 
The beginning of the year was fixed to the 1st of January; and 
the months were made to consist of 30 and 31 days alternately, 
with the exception of February, which in ordinary years had 
only 28 days, but in the fourth year, when the new day arising 
from the odd six hours was added to it, 29 days. 

This Julian calendar, though superior to any that had pre- 
ceded it, was still far from perfect, for the odd six hours is not 
actually six full hours, but 5 hours 48 minutes and 49 seconds 
as we have said : so that the year of the Julian calendar ex- 
ceeded the true solar year by 1 1 minutes and 1 1 seconds. 

This difference amounts in 130 years to an entire day, and 
in process of time throws the whole seasons again out of course. 
In the 1 6th century the vernal equinox, which had by the 
Council of Nice in a.d. 325 been fixed to the 21st of March 
was found to happen instead on the nth of that month, the 
error having, in the intervening period, accumulated to the 
extent of ten days. 

The present and prospective inconvenience of this state 
of things was represented to the Councils of Constance and 
Lateran, by Cardinals Ailli and Cusa, and attempts to remedy 
it were proposed and discussed. Pope Sixtus IV., in the 
year 1474, called to Rome the celebrated mathematician 
Regiomontanus, and bestowed on him the Archbishopric of 
Ratisbon, that through his aid he might accomplish the required 
fresh reformation of the calendar. The premature death of 
the mathematical archbishop, disappointed however the pro- 
ject, and nothing was done for another century. Then Pope 



396 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Gregory XIII., after consulting mathematicians, and obtaining 
the consent of the various princes of Christendom, to a plan 
submitted to him by the astronomer Luilius, called a council 
of the most learned prelates to consider the question, and 
having with their concurrence decided it, he published a 
brief in March, 1582, abrogating the Julian reckoning, and 
substituting for it the Gregorian calendar which we now 
employ. 

By this alteration, or u new style," the ten days which the 
civil year had gained on the true solar year, were deducted 
from the month of October of the year 1582, the equinox being 
thus brought back to the 21st of March, as it had been settled 
by the Nicene Council ; and in order to prevent a recurrence 
of the irregularity, it was ordered, that instead of every xooth 
year being a leap year, as by the old style, only every 400th 
year should be such, and the rest be considered as common 
years. As a day had been gained by the former method every 
hundred and thirty years, or about three days in four hundred 
years, the omission of three leap years every four centuries, 
would evidently nearly rectify the defect. A much more 
difficult matter was to adjust the lunar to the solar year, and 
to settle the time for the observance of Easter and other move- 
able feasts. 

It was ordered by the Council of Nice, that Easter should 
be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full-moon, next 
following the vernal equinox. In order that this rule might be 
properly observed, it was needful to know the days when the 
full moon would happen, in any given year. This however 
it was extremely difficult to ascertain : for the nineteen-years' 
cycle discovered by the Greek philosopher Meton, which nearly 
harmonizes the movements of sun and moon, and brings the 
days of new and full moons back to the same days of the year, 
was found to be too long by an hour and thirty-two minutes 
(Julian year measure). After sixteen Metonic or lunar cycles 
the true phases of the moon would precede those shown in 
the calendar by a whole day. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY 397 

At the time of the Gregorian reformation, the error occa- 
sioned by this means amounted to four days; had the old 
calendar still been followed, it would in time have announced 
full moon, at the time of change, and Easter would conse- 
quently have been celebrated at a period, exactly opposite 
to that commanded by the Church. By an ingenious device, 
Luilius, the astronomer employed by Gregory XIII. in this 
intricate business, succeeded in arranging a plan by which the 
period of the new moon may be ascertained for any month of 
any year. 

He rejected the " Golden numbers " formerly employed for 
the purpose, and made use of Epacts in their stead. 

The Epact is the moon's age at the end of the year. If for 
example the new moon occurs in a given year on new year's 
day, we should say there was no epact that year. But as twelve 
lunations (or lunar months) are completed in 354 days and the 
year is over 365 days, it is evident that on the second new 
year's day, the moon would already be eleven days old, while by 
the third, she would be twenty-two, or have twenty-two days' 
epact, and by the fourth thirty-three. But as the time of the 
entire lunation is never more than 29 days and a half, the epact 
cannot possibly exceed thirty. In the latter case, therefore, 
thirty must be subtracted, and at the beginning of the fourth 
year the epact would only be three. By observing this rule 
through a period of 19 years, the epacts would stand in the 
following order :— o, n, 22, 3, 14, 25, 6, 17, 28, 9, 20, 1, 12, 
23, 4, 15, 26, 7, 18. 

As in sixteen lunar cycles, or 304 years, the slight error 
of that cycle amounts to an entire day, these numbers have 
then to be increased by unity, and for the second period of 
304 years will stand in the order, 1, 12, 23, 4, 15, 26, 7, 18, 
29, 10, etc. 

Gregory XIII. ordered all ecclesiastics under his jurisdiction 
to conform to the new method of reckoning, and exhorted all 
Christian princes to adopt it in their dominions. The Catholic 
nations did so at once, the Protestant nations refused to for a 



398 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

time. But the difference between the " old " and new style, 
as the Julian and Gregorian accounts were called, occasioned 
so much confusion in the commercial affairs of the different 
states of Europe, that by degrees popular prejudice against the 
change was overcome even in Protestant countries, and in 
1752, the new style was by Act of Parliament adopted even in 
England. A century having elapsed, instead of cancelling ten 
days as the Pope had done, eleven days were ordered to be left 
out of the month of September, and accordingly on the second 
of that month the old style ceased, and the next day instead of 
being called the third, was called the fourteenth. Russia still 
retains the old style. 

This Gregorian calendar is practically correct for a very long 
period ; it is not absolutely so, and it would probably be im- 
possible to arrange a calendar that should be theoretically 
perfect for all time, but it is so accurately adjusted to actual 
solar and lunar movements, as to be free from the error of a 
day in some thousands of years. A better plan had been 
previously proposed which seems to have been unknown to 
Gregory XIII. Herschel says : " A rule proposed by Omar, 
a Persian astronomer of the court of Gelaleddin Melek Schah, 
in a.d. 1079 (or more than five centuries before the reforma- 
tion of Gregory) deserves notice. It consists in interpolating 
a day, as in the Julian system, every fourth year, only post- 
poning to the 33rd year the intercalation, which on that system 
would be made on the 32nd. This is equivalent to omitting 
the Julian intercalation altogether in each 128th year (retaining 
all the others). To produce an accumulated error of a day 
on this system, would require a lapse of 5000 years. So 
ihat the Persian astronomer's rule is not only far more simple 
but materially more exact than the Gregorian? 1 



CHAPTER III. 

CYCLICAL CHARACTER OF THE PROPHETIC PERIODS OF DANIEL 
AND THE APOCALYPSE. 

Discoveries of M. de Cheseaux. 

THE perplexities and difficulties which encumber the at- 
tempt to adapt brief periods of time to both solar and 
lunar movements, as in the calendar, disappear, directly it is a 
question of longer intervals. 

Short periods have to be artificially harmonized, longer ones 
harmonize themselves. There exist various times and seasons, 
which are naturally measurable both by solar years, and lunar 
months, without remainder, or with remainders so small as to 
be unimportant. 

Such periods are therefore Soli-lunar cycles, and we shall 
henceforth speak of them as such. They harmonize with more 
or less exactness solar and lunar revolutions, and they may 
be regarded as divinely appointed units for the measurement 
of long periods of time, units of precisely the same character 
as the day, month, and year, (that is created by solar, lunar, 
and terrestrial revolutions) but of larger dimensions. They are 
therefore periods distinctly marked oft as such, on the same 
principles as those on which our calendar is based, that is they 
are natural measures of time, furnished by the Creator Himself 
for human use. 

The lunar cycle of nineteen years employed by the Greeks 
is one of these periods, and the ancient cycle of Calippus is 
another. Their discovery has always been an object with 
astronomers, as their practical utility is considerable. But it 
was exceedingly difficult to find cycles of any tolerable accu- 
racy, especially cycles combining and harmonizing the day, and 
the month, with the year. 



4oo DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

About the middle of last century a remarkable fact was dis- 
covered by a Swiss astronomer M. de Cheseaux, a fact which 
is full of the deepest interest to the Christian mind, and which 
has never received either at the hands of the Church or of the 
world, the attention that it merits. 

The prophetic periods of 1260 years and 2300 years, assigned 
in the Book of Daniel and in the Apocalypse, as the duration 
of certain predicted events, are such soli-lunar cycles, cycles of 
remarkable perfection and accuracy, but whose existence was 
entirely unknown to astronomers, until, guided by sacred Scrip- 
ture, M. de Cheseaux discovered and demonstrated them to be 
such. And further, the difference between these two periods, 
which is 1040 years, is the largest accurate soli-lunar cycle known 

The importance of this discovery, and the fact that it is ex- 
ceedingly little known, must be our apology for entering into 
a somewhat full account of the matter here. It is besides vital 
to our own more immediate subject, and was indeed the means 
of leading us to the present investigation- 

M. de Cheseaux's book is out of print, difficult to procure 
und even to consult. A copy of it exists in the library of the 
University of Lausanne, and another in the British Museum. 
It is entitled " Memoires posthumes de M. de Cheseaux " and 
was edited and published by his sons, in 1754. It contains 
" Remarques historiques, chronologiques, et astronomiques, 
sur quelques endroits du livre de Daniel." The calculations of 
the astronomical part, were submitted to Messrs. Mairan and 
Cassini, celebrated astronomers of the Royal Academy of 
Sciences at Paris, neither of whom called in question the ac- 
curacy of M. de Cheseaux's principles, or the correctness of his 
results. M. Mairan, after having carefully read his essay, said 
that "it was impossible to doubt the facts and discoveries il 
contained ; but that he could not conceive how or why the) 
had come to be embodied so distinctly in the Holy Scrip 
tures." M. Cassini wrote, after having read the treatise and 
worked the problems, that the methods of calculating the solar 
and lunar positions and movements, which M. de Cheseaux 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 401 

had deduced from the cycles of the Book of Daniel, were most 
clear, and perfectly consistent with the most exact astronomy ;" 
he wished the essay to be read before the Academy. 

M. de Cheseaux was engaged in some chronological re- 
searches, and in order to fix with certainty the date of the Cru- 
cifixion, he was led to examine certain parts of Scripture, and 
especially the Book of Daniel. The first portion of his essay is 
purely chronological, and unimportant to our subject, we may 
say, however, that he clearly perceived that the "time times 
and a half" of Dan. vii. meant a period of 1260 years. " The 
importance of this conclusion and of some of the foregoing 
principles," he adds, "will be perceived, when we show how 
it led to a discovery of the singular relation which exists 
between this period of Daniel, and the facts of astronomy. 
However strange it may seem, I can positively deduce from 
the periods of Daniel, as accurately as by the best astronomical 
methods, and even more so, the five elements of the solar 
theory." 

He goes on to explain what a cycle is : "a' period which 
brings into harmony different celestial revolutions, containing a 
certain definite number of each, without remainder or fraction," 
and he shows that there are four different kinds of cycles con- 
nected with the sun, moon, and earth. 

1. Those harmonizing the solar day and year. 

2. Those harmenizing the solar year and lunar month. 

3. Those harmonizing the solar day and lunar month. 

4. Those harmonizing all three, day, month, and year. 

M. de Cheseaux adds, "the discovery of such cycles has always 
been a great object with astronomers and chronologists. They 
have considered it so difficult a matter, that they have almost 
laid it down as a principle that it is impossible, at any rate as 
regards those of the fourth class. Till now, the discovery of a 
cycle of this kind has been to astronomers, — like perpetual 
motion to mechanicians, — a sort of philosopher's stone. 
Anxious to settle whether the thing were really impossible, 
I began some time ago to try for a cycle of the second kind." 

D D 



402 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

M. de Cheseaux then describes the process by which he was 
led to the discovery that 315 years is such a soli-lunar cycle, 
ten times more exact than the nineteen years Metonic cycle in 
use by the ancients ; the sun and moon coming after a lapse 
of that period, to within three hours twenty-four seconds of 
absolute agreement : and he proceeds, — 

" I had no sooner discovered this cycle, than I observed that 
it was a quarter of the 1260 years of Daniel, and the Apocalypse, 
and that consequently, this period is itself a soli-lunar cycle" 
after which the sun and moon return, within less than half 
a degree, to the same point of the ecliptic precisely, and that 
within an hour of each other.* 

" The relation of this period, assigned by the Holy Spirit as 
the limit of certain political events, to the most notable move- 
ments of the heavenly bodies, made me think it might be the 
same with the 2300 years. By the aid of the astronomic 
tables I examined this latter, and found that at the end of 2300 
Gregorian years, minus six hours fourteen seconds, the sun and 
the moon return to within half a degree of the place from which 
they started, and that an hour later the sun has reached its 
exact starting point on the ecliptic : whence it follows that the 
prophetic period of 2300 years, is a cyclical period (also re- 
markable for the number of its aliquot parts, and for containing 
a complete number of cycles) and o?ie so perfect, that though it is 
thirty times longer than the celebrated cycle of Calippus, it has an 
error of only thirteen hours, a seventeenth part of the error of that 
ancient cycle. 

"The exact similarity of the error of these two cycles of 1260 
and 2300 years, made me soon conclude that the difference 
between them, 1040 years, ought to be a perfect cycle, free 
from all error ; and all the more remarkable as uniting the 
three kinds of cycles, and furnishing consequently a cycle of 



That is, after 460,205 days 6 h. the sun and moon come into conjunc- 
tion, and in 460,205 days 7 h. 23 m. the sun has returned to its exact starting 
point on the ecliptic — a period of 1 260 solar years. (According to more 
accurate modern measures 1260 years are about three hours less.) 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 403 

that fourth kind, so long sought in vain, and finally concluded 
to be chimerical, impossible to find. 

"On examination of this period of 1040 years by the best 
modern astronomic tables I found that it was even so. Its error 
is absolutely imperceptible, in so long a period, and may indeed 
be accounted for by errors in the tables themselves, owing to 
the inaccuracy of some of the ancient observations on which 
they are founded. 

" This period of 1040 years, indicated indirectly by the Holy 
Ghost, is a cycle at once solar, lunar, a?id diurnal or terrestrial 
of the most perfect accuracy. I subsequently discovered two 
singular confirmations of this fact, which I will explain pre- 
sently, when I have adduced all my purely astronomic proofs ; 
may I in the meantime be permitted to give to this new cycle, 
the name of the Daniel cycle." 

M. de Cheseaux then goes into full astronomic detail, of a kind 
that would fail to interest our readers, though proving the very 
remarkable nature of this cycle : and he subsequently continues, 
" As I before said, a cycle of this kind had long been sought 
in vain ; no astronomer or chronologist, had been able to light 
upon one for nineteen centuries ; and yet for two thousand 
three hundred years, there it has been, written in characters 
legible enough, in the Book of Daniel : legible, that is, to 
him who. was willing to take the trouble of comparing the great 
prophetic periods, with the movements of the heavenly bodies ; 
in other words, to him, who compared the book of nature with 
the book of revelation? 

" The slightest error, even of a few seconds, in the deter- 
mination of the true length of the solar year, would remove 
altogether from these numbers, their cyclical character. Only 
the perfection of modern astronomical instruments in fact, 
can demonstrate it at all. So that we have the problem, How 
did Daniel, or the author of the Book of Daniel, whoever he 
was (if, as some assert, the prophecy is of a later date than 
Daniel), light upon these undiscoverable and undiscovered, yet 
excessively accurate celestial cycles, at a time when there were 



404 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

no instruments in existence capable of measuring solar revolu- 
tions with sufficient accuracy, to reveal the cyclical character of 
the periods ? " 

M. de Cheseaux adds, " I must close with one observation. 
For many ages the Book of Daniel, and especially these passages 
of it, have been quoted and commented on by numerous and 
varied authors, so that it is impossible for a moment to call in 
question their antiquity. Who can have taught their author the 
marvellous relation of the periods he selected with soli-lunar 
revolutions? Is it possible, considering all these points, to 
fail to recognise in the Author of the Book of Daniel, the 
Creator of the heavens and all their hosts, of the earth and the 
things that are therein ? " 

In a subsequent portion of his dissertation, M. de Cheseaux 
shows that not only can the five solar elements be deduced 
from the data in Daniel, but also the lunar. He compared his 
theoretic results with the observations recorded by the ancient 
astronomers Hipparchus and Ptolemy. Calculating forward 
first, he finds that the mean new moon of the vernal equinox 
of a.d. 1879 will, at Alexandria in Egypt, occur at 11.43^ p.m. 
on the 10th of March (O.S.). He then applies this cycle of 
1040 years, and reckons backwards. Two such cycles, equal 
to 2080 years, from the above date, carry back to 1 1.43 J p.m. 
of March 26, B.C. 202 (i.e., sixteen days later than March 10, 
reckoning by Julian calendar). 

Now according to the tables of Hipparchus and Ptolemy the 
new moon of the vernal equinox that year, did at Alexandria 
fall on the 26th of March, at 11.39 p.m., not quite five minutes 
earlier than, by the cyclical calculation, it should have fallen ! 
M. de Cheseaux adds, " I leave it to others to judge whether a 
slight difference such as this, may not well be attributed to the 
inevitable errors of the best ancient observations." 

In his second dissertation this astronomer deduces the true 
size and figure of the earth, from these same cycles, and works 
by means of them some thirty or forty elaborate astronomical 
and geographical problems. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 405 

Such were M. de Cheseaux's discoveries; and they are of 
the deepest interest and importance, as manifesting, in a new 
light, the wisdom and glory of God in connection with his 
holy word. That the ancient prophet Daniel twenty-five cen- 
turies ago, and "the disciple whom Jesus loved" eighteen 
centuries ago, should both have incorporated in their mysterious 
books of symbolic prophecy, as the chronological limits of 
certain most important events, periods of time, which the 
accurate researches of modern science have proved to be cycles 
formed by vast, complex, long-enduring movements of the 
heavenly bodies, seems a marvellous fact, a fact to be ac- 
counted for only by the Divine inspiration under which these 
holy men of old wrote. 

For it is certain, and none can dispute it, that these periods 
are accurate celestial cycles : it is equally certain, and few will 
be inclined to question it, that neither Daniel, nor John, the 
fisherman of the Sea of Galilee, were able to calculate these 
cycles, or were even aware of their existence. Had they been 
in intercourse with the first astronomers of their day, or even 
had they been themselves astronomers of the highest attain- 
ments, it would have been impossible for them in the then 
existing state of astronomic science, to have observed the 
cyclical character of these periods. There was no such exact 
knowledge of either the true length of the solar year, or lunar 
month, as would have made the discovery of these cycles 
possible. In Daniel's day even the Metonic or lunar cycle was 
unknown, and these larger but similar cycles, were as a matter 
of fact, discovered only last century. 

It was therefore certainly not as moved by their own intelli- 
gence, that the sacred writers selected these periods; and if 
they were not moved by Divine inspiration, how is the fact 
of their use of them to be accounted for? Could it be by 
chance — by accident — that to certain supremely important 
series of events, were assigned as the period of their duration, 
these cyclical periods ? 

Such an explanation of the fact, would be improbable to the 



406 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

last degree ! Nothing but an unwillingness to admit the 
miracle of inspiration, could lead to its being suggested as 
an alternative. It would be an unsatisfactory account of the 
matter had there been one single cycle only, so employed, and 
the fact that there are three, makes it wholly inadmissible. 
But there are more, and even many such proofs, of the use in 
Scripture by writers ignorant of astronomy, of periods marked 
out distinctly as cycles, by the less obvious revolutions of the 
heavenly bodies. This fact, which has we believe never before 
been demonstrated, is of such importance as enhancing the evi- 
dence of the inspiration of Scripture, as to deserve the most 
careful consideration. 

In the following chapters we shall endeavour to unfold the 
further multiplied, and most remarkable links of connection 
which we have ourselves discovered, between the chronology 
of Scripture, historic and prophetic, and the cycles of soli-lunar 
revolution. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PROPHETIC TIMES AND THEIR EPACTS. 

PROPHECY, which occupies about a third of the Bible, 
threw its light beforehand, as we have seen, on all the 
events of importance which were to befall the typical and the 
antitypical Israels, and the empires, nations, and powers with 
which in the course of their long earthly histories they were to 
be brought more especially into contact. One large group of 
prophecies range themselves around the rise of the Jewish 
people, and a similar group clusters around its fall. The 
majority of these sacred predictions have in them, no chrono- 
logical element, but in several, statements of time are embodied. 
The predictions we have now to pass in review, are the 
chronological prophecies, delivered about the time of the fall 
of the Jewish nation, by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel. Some 
of these prophecies are literal, and some symbolic. In the 
literal predictions, the chronological statements are made in 
plain terms, while in the symbolic, they are expressed on the 
year-day system, in harmony with the nature of the prophecy. 
The former generally relate to events near at hand, and were 
given for the benefit of the generation which received them, 
or of the immediately succeeding generations, while the latter 
foretell a remote future, and were given, less for the benefit of 
the men of that age, than for our admonition, on whom the 
ends of the world are come. 

To the prophet who was privileged to receive these won- 
derful Divine revelations of the future, and to behold in vision 
mystic symbols of events to take place in the time of the end, 
it was said concerning them, " Thou, O Daniel, shut up the 
words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end ; " and 
to others, as well as to this greatest of all chronological pro- 



4o8 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

phets, " it was revealed, that not unto themselves but unto us, 
they did minister " in their prophecies concerning the " suffer- 
ings of Christ, and the glories that should follow." These 
mystic revelations were not designed to be fully understood 
until after the lapse of ages, when the fulfilment of a portion 
should have thrown light on the meaning of the remainder, 
hence they were given in symbolic language, and their chrono- 
logy expressed on the year-day system. 

In this second class of prophecies are comprised Daniel's 
predictions as to the duration of the restored Jewish polity 
after the Babylonish captivity ; the period to elapse before the 
advent and death of Messiah the prince, and the subsequent 
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the rejection of the 
Jewish people, and desolation of their Sanctuary ; the long 
course of the times of the Gentiles, with the events marking the 
close of that great dispensation ; the resurrection of the dead ; 
and the final blessedness of the righteous. 

Thus, from the time of the prophet Daniel, right on over the 
first and second advents of Christ, and over all the intervening 
events, these far-reaching and majestic prophecies throw their 
Divine light, showing both the close of the Jewish economy, 
and the end of the Christian dispensation, and fixing before- 
hand, in mystic terms, the chronological limits of both. 

They were not given for the wicked to understand, but for 
" the wise " to ponder in their hearts, and at the time of the 
end, when knowledge should be increased, to comprehend with 
ever growing clearness. 

The predictions of the first, or literal class, which we shall 
have to consider are, — 

i. That recorded in Isa. vii. 8 ; the " sixty and five years" 
foretold by the prophet, as to end in the cutting off of Israel's 
national existence by their Assyrian conquerors. 

2. That given in Jer. xxv. n; and xxix. 10; the "seventy 
years " twice predicted as the predetermined duration of that 
Babylonish captivity which was sent upon Judak as a punish- 
ment for sin. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 409 

3. The " thousand years " of the millennial reign of Christ. 
Rev. xx. 

Those of the second; or symbolic class, which must pass 
under our review, are, — 

1. The "seventy weeks," or 490 years, foretold by Daniel 
as the interval destined to elapse between the rebuilding of 
Jerusalem and the advent and atoning work of the Messiah. 
Dan. ix. 

2. The 2300 years, similarly predicted as the long extended 
period which would elapse before the final cleansing of the 
Sanctuary. Dan. viii. 

3. The 1260 years predicted domination of the little horn, 
which is the assigned duration of other events also. This 
period is the base of several others. It is a half week ; " time 
times and a half," so we must consider the week of which it is 
half, the "seven times" or 2520 years of Gentile dominion : 
and it receives in Dan. xii. two additions, of 30 and 45 years, 
so it must be studied both alone, and with its addenda, i.e., as 
1290 and 1335 years. It is indeed the most important of 
these symbolic periods, and will repay the fullest investigation. 

The periods we have to consider are therefore the fol- 
lowing : — 



65 


years 


70 


3> 


490 


» 


2300 


J) 


1260 


>> 


2520 


>3 


1290 


» 


1335 


5J 


3° 


>> 


45 


» 


2595 


}> 


1000 


)) 



Isa. 1 


rii. 8. 


Jer. xxv. 11. 
Dan. ix. 
Dan. viii. 


Dan. 
Dan. 
Dan. 


Vll. 

iv. 
xii. 


>> 


» 


?> 


» 


» 


>? 


V 

Rev. 


XX. 



A little consideration will show a variety of beautiful and 



410 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

harmonious relations between these apparently dissimilar and 
incongruous periods. 

They are all proportionate parts of a great week of mil- 
lenaries, and fit into each other, and into a framework of yoco 
years, in a way that proves almost to demonstration, that they 
were designed so to do. 

The 70 years of the Captivity may be regarded as a day ; 
the 490 years of the restoration is then a week of such days ; 
the 1260 years of the dominion of the little horn, is eighteen 
such days; the 2520 years of the times of the Gentiles is 
thirty-six such days (a tenth of 360 or a year of such days) 
and the 2300 years to the cleansing of the Sanctuary is a third 
of the whole period, the nearest third of seven millenaries, 
possible in centuries. 

Of all these periods the root is evidently the week of years, 
the seven years which, under the Levitical economy, extended 
from one sabbatic year to another. 

The 70 years during which the Babylonish Captivity was 
appointed to endure, were 10 such weeks, and the 490 years of 
the restored Judaism 70. The little horn was to reign 180 such 
weeks, and the "Times of the Gentiles " to extend over 360, 
or an entire year of such weeks, while the whole period of 
seven millenaries contains 1000 such weeks. 

It must be remembered also that the Jubilee period estab- 
lished under the law of Moses, was seveti such weeks, or 
49 years ; so that the period of restored Judaism to the time 
of Messiah the Prince, was a tenfold Jubilee, or 490 years. 

It should further be noted, that the two principal of these 
periods, the 2520 years, and the 2300 years, relate respectively 
the one to the throne, and the other to the Sanctuary ; the 
first embracing the whole period of Gentile rule, from the con- 
quest of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar to the establishment of 
the kingdom of Christ, the true son of David ; and the other 
extending from the time of the Medo-Eersian kingdom, to 
the final cleansing of the Sanctuary, when Jerusalem ceases 
to be trodden down of the Gentiles, the Times of the Gentiles 



AND CHRONOLOGY. 411 



being fulfilled. The one is thus civil, and the other sacred, 
in character. 

Harmonious and deeply significant mutual relations subsist 
therefore among these periods, and between them and the 
legal and ceremonial times established under the Mosaic 
economy. It remains to show that they are connected also 
with other periods of Jewish history, and that though they are 
not all soli-lunar cycles, they form a series of septiform soli-lunar 
periods, and that, of so marked and accurate character, as to 
preclude all thought of accidental coincidence, and to declare 
with unmistakable clearness the Creator's plan. 

We proceed to consider them in detail. 



The Sixty-five Years of Isaiah vii. 8. 

Chronological prophecy has always been given, not for seasons 
of prosperity, but for seasons of trouble and adversity : for 
nearlv a thousand years, — ever since the prediction of Israel's 
forty years' wandering in the wilderness, it had been discon- 
tinued in Israel, when it was renewed shortly before the first 
captivity of the ten tribes, and continued at intervals during 
two centuries, up to the time of the last of Daniel's visions, 
and the restoration of Judah from Babylon. 

In the year of the death of Uzziah, — the profane and pre- 
sumptuous monarch who intruded into the Holiest, and was 
struck with leprosy in consequence, — there was granted to 
Isaiah the prophet a vision of the God of glory ; a vision of 
Christ the Lord, enthroned in heaven and adored, as the thrice 
Holy One, by the Seraphim. 

The pollution and approaching rejection and desolation of 
Israel were also shown to him, and the future restoration of a 
remnant. This vision was immediately prior to the com- 
mencement of the " Times of the Gentiles," for it was given in 
the year of Uzziah's death ; and early in the reign of his grand- 
son Ahaz, there was revealed to Isaiah the exact measures 
of the brief period that should elapse, before the commence- 



4.12 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

ment of the Captivity of Israel; "within sixty and five years 
shall Ephraim be broken, that it be not a people ' ; (Isa. vii. 8). 

Called to his sacred office, and cleansed for it by a live coal 
from the altar applied to his lips, at this solemnly momentous 
crisis in the history of Israel, on the very verge of their in- 
cipient rejection by God, as his people, Isaiah was constituted 
the evangelical prophet. 

He was commissioned to unfold the rejection and death of 
Messiah, the call of the Gentiles, and the final restoration of 
Israel. Through him, living as he did just before their incipi- 
ent commencement, was revealed the general nature of the 
"Times of the Gentiles;" while to Daniel, living at their full 
commencement about a hundred and fifty years later, was 
revealed their duration, together with a multitude of important 
events, destined to take place during their course. 

This first of the Captivity series of chronologic prophecies 
foretold the overthrow of the ten tribes only. 

It dates from a well-marked epoch ; a certain confederacy of 
the king of Syria, with Pekah king of Israel, and their joint 
invasion of Judah (b.c. 741). 

This attack of the hostile allies, struck terror into the heart 
of Ahaz king of Judah, and into the hearts of his people ; 
" their hearts were moved as the trees of the wood are moved 
with the wind " (Isa. vii. 2) ; and it was then that Isaiah the 
prophet was sent, to announce to the trembling king of Judah, 
as a message from Jehovah, the approaching downfall of one 
of his enemies. " Within sixty and five years shall Ephraim 
be broken, that it be not a people." 

This prediction received its fulfilment, in two stages. Shal- 
manezer, king of Assyria, came up against Samaria in the reign 
of Hoshea (b.c. 723) and after a siege of three years, took the 
city, carried Israel away into Assyria, placed them in Halah 
and Habor and other cities, and located colonies of Assyrians 
in the cities of Samaria, in their room. Subsequently, in 
676 b.c, Esarhaddon the son of Sennacherib completed the 
work thus begun — carried away the remaining Israelites, re- 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 413 

placing them by fresh parties of Assyrian colonists (from whom 
the Samaritans, with whom "the Jews have no dealings," 
sprung), and completing the destruction of Ephraim. 

This period of sixty-five years stands chronologically thus, — 

B.C. 74.1. Sixty-five Years to Ephraim's Fall. B.C. 676. 

It comprised the period of the fall of the ten tribes, as 
distinguished from that of Judah; and its close synchronized 
with the commencement of Judah's captivities. It formed the 
gateway, so to speak, of the great seven times of Jewish desola- 
tion, for this completion of the judgment on the ten tribes, was 
quickly followed by the Babylonish captivity, and the total 
subjection of the entire Jewish nation to Gentile rule. 

Now this period of sixy-five years, is not a soli-lunar cycle, 
but the solar gain on the lunar year during its course, is a 
septiform period, seven hundred and seven days. 

Seventy Years. 

By the mouth of Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, the Lord 
foretold a seventy years' captivity in Babylon, as the punish- 
ment shortly to overtake Judah for their long-continued sins of 
idolatry and obstinate rebellion against God. (Jer. xxv. 8-12.) 

Unlike the judgment denounced against the ten tribes, to 
which no promise of speedy restoration was attached, a return 
to their own land was distinctly promised to Judah, at the 
expiration of this seventy years. 

" Thus saith the Lord of hosts ; Because ye have not heard 
my words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the 
north, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, 
my servant, and will bring them against this land, and against 
the inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round 
about, and will utterly destroy them, and make them an as- 
tonishment, and an hissing, and perpetual desolations. More- 
over I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice 



4H DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the 
bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle. 
And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonish- 
ment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon 
seventy years. And it shall come to pass, when seventy years 
are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and 
that nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the land of 
the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations " (Jer. 
xxv. 8-12). 

Towards the close of the captivity thus foretold, Daniel 
says, " In the first year of Darius ... I Daniel under- 
stood by books the number of the years, whereof the word of 
the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet, that He would accom- 
plish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem" 

Now this period of seventy years, is a remarkable one in 
many ways. It extends from the first destruction of Jerusalem 
by Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kings xxiv. 10 ; and Jer. xxv. 1), to 
the Edict of Cyrus for the return of the Jews, and the rebuild- 
ing of the temple (Ezra i. 2), that is to say, from B.C. 605 to 
the end of B.C. 536. 

Its relation to the entire course of the history of the Baby- 
lonian Empire, and its chronological position in that history, 
must first be noted. The duration of that empire, dating from 
the era of Nabonassar (which is its own era), to the capture of 
Babylon by Cyrus, which preceded the restoration of the Jews, 
was 210 years ; from B.C. 747 to B.C. 538. 

Now 210 years, is three times seventy years ; and the seventy 
years during which the captive Jews hung their harps upon 
the willows, and sat down and wept by the rivers of Babylon, 
almost exactly coincided with the closing third of the existence 
of the empire. In the year B.C. 538, Babylon fell, Darius the 
Median took the kingdom (Dan. v. 31), and the great Medo- 
Persian Empire succeeded the Babylonian. 

This period of 210 years, is also seven prophetic months (30 x 
7 = 210) so that the typical Babylon lasted seven such months, 
and the antitypical Babylon is twice over in the Apocalypse 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 415 

said to last six times seven — forty and two — such months. 
This is the period during which the symbolic holy city and 
temple court, are trodden under foot (Rev. xi. 2) and the 
period of the Beast (Rev. xiii. 5). 

Seventy years was the life-time of the great king and sweet 
Psalmist of Israel, " David was thirty years old when he began 
to reign, and he reigned forty years" (1 Sam. v. 4). Moses 
the man of God, declares it to be the normal measure of human 
life, " The days of our years are threescore years and ten ; " and 
it is, as we have seen, the day of which other prophetic periods 
are multiples. 

It is also ten times the sabbatic week of years, and indeed 
the Captivity may be regarded as a larger form of that week, 
during which the land, as God by Moses had threatened it 
should do, lay desolate and enjoyed its sabbaths. 

Now this period, is astronomically, a soli-lunar cycle, in 
which the solar year gains 021 the calendar lunar year of 360 
days, one entire year,* 

The Seventy Weeks of Dan. ix„ 

When the seventy years of the Babylonish Captivity were 
nearly over, Daniel, " understanding by books " (the books of 
the prophet Jeremiah) that they must be well-nigh ended, gave 
himself to earnest supplication for his people, and about the 
city and Sanctuary, which, after a life-time of honourable exile, 
were still dear to his heart. 

As David, when God had revealed to him his purposes of 
grace respecting his seed, cried, " O Lord God, the word that 
Thou hast spoken, establish it for ever, and do as Thou hast 
said ! " so Daniel, when he understood God's intention quickly 



* Accurately, 367 days (a calendar lunar year, and a week) ; one day 
and a fraction in excess of the 365 J days of the true solar year, hut nearer 
to it, than would be the gain or epact of either 69 or 71 years, the nearest 
possible therefore. 



4i6 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS' 

to terminate the long captivity of the Jews, began to pray foi 
the accomplishment of his purpose. What a lesson, that a 
knowledge of the purposes of God, so far from leading to a 
fatalistic carelessness about their accomplishment, should lead 
to earnest, believing, hopeful, supplication ! 

" Cause Thy face to shine upon Thy sanctuary ! Behold the 
city that is called by Thy name ! Defer not, O my God ! " 
so pleaded this "man greatly beloved," this devout and intelli- 
gent student of prophecy, who became in his turn a prophet, 
and we may say, the prince of prophets. 

While he was speaking in prayer, the answer was given. 
Gabriel was sent forth, commissioned to give him further 
understanding of the counsels of God, about the city and 
temple of Jerusalem, and the future fortunes of the Jewish 
nation. 

Daniel's mind was full of the just expiring period of seventy 
years. Gabriel revealed to him, as determined by God, a new 
period of "seventy weeks." " Seventy weeks are determined 
upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the trans- 
gression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconcilia- 
tion for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and 
to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most 
Holy. Know therefore and understand, that from the going 
forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem 
unto Messiah the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and threescore 
and two weeks : the street shall be built again, and the wall, 
even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks 
shall Messiah be cut off, but not for Himself : and the people 
of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the 
sanctuary ; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and 
unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And He 
shall confirm the covenant with many for one week : and in the 
midst of the week He shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation 
to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations He shall 
make it desolate [or, upon the battlements shall be the idols of 
the desolator], even until the consummation, and that deter- 



AND CHRONOLOGY. 417 



mined shall be poured upon the desolate " [or, desolator]. — • 
Dan. ix. 24-27. 

From the then approaching command to restore and to build 
again Jerusalem, to the coming of Messiah the Prince, — that 
grand goal of all Jewish expectations, — was to be "seventy 
weeks" The event proved they were to be weeks of years, 
not of days ; the interval was to be a great week of Captivity 
periods, a week each of whose days should equal the seventy 
years of the Babylonish Captivity in duration. This had con- 
sisted of seventy solar years ; the new period was to include 
seventy Sabbatic years, 490 years. The reason why the chron- 
ology of this prediction is expressed in symbolic language, 
though all the rest is literal, is obvious. 

It was needful so to word the prophecy, as to leave the Jews 
free to receive or reject Messiah when He should come, for He 
was not to be imposed on them against their will. His coming 
was to be a test : " It may be they will reverence my Son." 
Had the interval to the Advent been in the prophecy clearly 
defined as 490 years, Israel would not have been left free to 
say, as they alas ! did, " We will not have this man to reign 
over us." " He came unto his own, and his own received 
Him not." Messiah was, as predicted, cut off, which would 
hardly have been possible had the date of his appearance been 
beyond dispute. It was essential that the form of the predic- 
tion should not compel a recognition of Jesus of Nazareth : 
hence the adoption of language which time alone could in- 
terpret. A term of ambiguous meaning, though suggesting 
common weeks, was employed, and yet the larger reckoning 
was not by it excluded. On the contrary, it was the basis of 
the expectation of Messiah's immediate advent, so prevalent in 
Jerusalem when He did appear. 

What then is this great period of four hundred and ninety 
years ? 

In reply, let it first be noted that it was no new period in the 
history of Israel. It was their jubilee of forty-nine years on a 
larger scale, a tenfold jubilee measure; and by it, previous 

E £ 



418 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 



chapters in their history had been regulated. It may be said 
indeed to be the peculiar period of the seed of Abram. The 
first stage of Jewish history from Abraham to the entrance into 
Canaan in the days of Joshua, is similarly a tenfold jubilee, a 
" seventy weeks," an interval of about 490 years. This was 
before actual jubilee reckoning began, for that was ordained to 
be from the time " when ye be come into your land." From 
Joshua's conquest of Canaan, B.C. 1585-6, to the commence- 
ment of the Jewish kingdom under Saul (b.c. 1096), was also, 
as far as can be ascertained, ten jubilees, or seventy weeks, 
that is 490 years, the period of the Judges, and of the prophet 
Samuel ; — the Theocracy of Israel. 

From the accession of Saul, the first king (b.c. 1096), to the 
capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, in the days of the 
last king (b.c. 606), there elapsed ten jubilees more, another 
seventy weeks, or 490 years, the period of independent Jewish 
monarchy. So that the seventy weeks from the restoration to 
Messiah the Prince, was the fourth in a series of such periods, 
extending back to the days of Abraham, just as the seventy 
years of the Captivity was the third in a series of such periods, 
dating from the era of Babylon, the era of Nabonassai , God 
had employed both periods, before He announced either. This 
great period of 490 years is the connecting link between 
Old and New Testament times. Its closing portion was the 
period of the Advent, the atoning death, and the world redeem- 
ing work of the Son of God. 

The soli-lunar measures of four hundred and ninety years 
are as follows : they contain twenty-five lunar cycles ; and 
the solar gain on the lunar year in these twenty-five cycles, 
m twice seven lunar years and seven months. 

There is a slight fractional remainder in years, the epact of 
which, added to that of the twenty-five lunar cycles, makes 
the epact of the whole 490 years, twice seven solar years and 
seven months, with a fractional remainder of about eight days, 
calculating by the true lunar and solar years. But calculating 
by the Julian solar, and calendar lunar years, the epact or 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 419 

difference is seven calendar lunar years and seven weeks, 
without remainder. 

We may add, that in 490 years, the equinoxes retrograde seven 
days. Their annual retrogression is 20 m. 20 s., which amounts 
to seven days (within about two hours) in the " seventy weeks/'* 

The "Time Times and a Half," or 1260 Years. 
Dan. vii. 25. 

This is the next link in the chain of chronological prophecy 
The period is mentioned, under different names, seven tiines in 
Scripture — in two chapters of Daniel, and three of Revelation. 

It is the duration assigned to, 

1. The domination of the little horn over the 

saints 

2. The closing period of Jewish dispersion 

3. The sojourn of the woman in the wilder- 

ness ...... 

4. The same, her flight from the serpent 

5. The treading under foot of the Holy City. 

6. The prophesying of the two witnesses 

7. The duration of " the Beast/' or 8th head 

of the Roman Empire . . . Rev. xihV 



* We may also notice that the 49 years jubilee is a soli-lunar cycle, its 
error being one day and a fraction. In 490 years this error amounts to 
thirteen and a quarter days, or in whole numbers, fourteen days, i.e., two 
weeks. 

\ The following are the passages in which it occurs : — 

1. Of the Little Horn of the fourth or Roman Empire it is said, " He shall 
speak great words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of 
the Most High, and think to change times and laws : and they shall be 

GIVEN INTO HIS HAND UNTIL A TIME AND TIMES AND THE DIVIDING OF 

TIME. But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his dominion, 
to consume and to destroy it unto the end. And the kingdom and dominion, 
and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given xo 
the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting 
kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey Him " (Dan. vii. 25-27). 

2. "And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the 
waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders? 
And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the writers of the 



Dan. 


vii. 


Dan. 


viii. 


Rev. 


xii. 


Rev. 


xii. 


Rev. 


xi. 


Rev. 


xi. 



420 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

It is of course evident that 1260 days are the same period 
as forty and two months (30 x 42 = 1260), and that forty and 
two months are the same period as three years and a half 



river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto 

HEAVEN, AND SWARE BY HlM THAT LIVETH FOR EVER, THAT IT SHALL 

BE FOR A time, times, and an half ; and when he shall have accomplished 
to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished. 
And I heard, but I understood not : then said I, O my Lord, what shall be 
the end of these things ? And He said, Go thy way, Daniel : for the 
words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. Many shall be 
purified, and made white, and tried ; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and 
none of the wicked shall understand ; but the wise shall understand. " Con- 
nect verse 4, "But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, 
even to the time of the end : many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall 
be increased" (Dan. xii.). 

3. It is the period of the sojourn of the woman in the wilderness. 
" And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he per- 
secuted the woman which brought forth the man child. And to the woman 
were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilder- 
ness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, 

AND HALF A TIME, FROM THE FACE OF THE SERPENT " (Rev. xii. 13, 14). 

4. " She brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a 
rod of iron : and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne. And 

THE WOMAN FLED INTO THE WILDERNESS, WHERE SHE HATH A PLACE 
PREPARED OF GOD, THAT THEY SHOULD FEED HER THEREjA THOUSAND 
TWO HUNDRED AND THREESCORE DAYS " (Rev. xii. 5, 6). 

5. It is the period of the treading under foot of the holy city. " And 
there was given me a reed like unto a rod : and the angel stood saying, 
Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship 
therein. But the court which is without the temple leave out, and mea- 
sure it not ; for it is given unto the Gentiles : and the holy city shall 

THEY TREAD UNDER FOOT FORTY AND TWO MONTHS " (Rev. xi. 1,2). 

6. It is the period during which the two witnesses prophesy. "And I 
will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a 

THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED AND THREESCORE DAYS, CLOTHED IN SACK- 
CLOTH " (Rev. xi. 3). 

7. It is the period of the Beast. ' ' And I saw a beast rise up out of the 
sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and 
upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was 
like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth 
as the mouth of a lion : and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, 
and great authority. And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to 
death; and his deadly wound was healed : and all the world wondered after 
the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the 
beast : and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast ? 
and who is able to make war with him ? And there was given unto him a 
mouth speaking great things and blasphemies ; and POWER WAS GIVEN UNTO 
HIM TO CONTINUE FORTY AND TWO MONTHS " (Rev. xiii. I-5). 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 421 

(42-4-12 = 3D, and that therefore, on the year-day principle, this 
seven times mentioned interval, is one of 1260 literal years; 
half oi the great week of " seven times," or 2520 years, which 
measures the Gentile dispensation. 

It is primarily the period of the dominion of the little horn 
of the fourth beast of Daniel's vision. That beast as we know 
symbolised the Roman Empire ; and the little horn which had 
eyes and a mouth speaking great things, and which persecuted 
and wore out the saints of the Most High, represents a power 
which was to arise in the latter days of that empire, which 
would be like the other horns a civil and political power, and 
unlike them, at the same time, a religious power — unquestion- 
ably the Roman Papal dynasty. 

The second symbol, to which the same period is attached 
is, as we have seen, the persecuting blasphemous eighth head 
of the Roman Beast, described in Revelation xiii. We have 
already shown that these represent one and the same power. 
They both rise in the latter stage of the Empire ; they both 
speak great words against the Most High ; they both wage war 
against the saints and overcome them ; and they both endure 
for this period. There cannot be two such powers, in the same 
days of the same Empire ; therefore these passages refer to the 
same power — the Papacy. 

In Rev. xiii., a mysterious number is attached to this power, 
as " the number of his name," and special attention is called to 
it. " Here is wisdom, let him that hath understanding count 
the number of the Beast, for it is the number of a man, and 
his number is six hundred, threescore, and six." A trine of 
sixes, — 666. 

Now in the Apocalypse especially, the number seven, is, as 
elsewhere throughout Scripture, prominent as the sacred num- 
ber of perfection and completeness. The contents of the book 
which it represents as opened by the Lamb, is contained under 
seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven vials — a trine of sevens. 

It is in this book that the number of the Beast is thus pre- 
sented as a trine of sixes, and the contrast, as well as the 



422 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

intrinsic meaning of the numeral, intimates, that whatever else 
it may be, it is a perfect number of imperfection, or rather a 
number denoting perfect imperfection. 

As this is the number of the Beast, we may expect to find it 
in various shapes in the chronology of the Beast, and in that of 
his most conspicuous Old Testament types. And if is there; 
a fact which has never before, we believe, been noted, but which 
is surely full of solemn importance. God has, — in secret 
cipher, — engraven this stigma, this mark of reprobation, on 
the very brow of the period of the self- exalting, blaspheming, 
saint-persecuting, power ; and He has besides, in order that we 
may not fail to note the contrast, set it in the midst of a series 
of periods, whose septiform measures, bring out its peculiar 
and evil character. 

There is nothing whatever sacred or septiform about this 
period, nothing sabbatic, nothing suggestive of rest, or worship, 
or liberty, as in the sevenfold sabbatic and jubilee series. Like 
some sounds in music, it is a discord, not a harmony ; a 
symbol of what is imperfect and evil. 

i . Twelve hundred and sixty years is, first, as we have seen, 
eighteen of the 70-years cycle. It is 6 + 6 + 6 such cycles. 

2. And when we examine its lunar cycle measures we find 
that they similarly present a trine of sixes, for it is — 

66 lunar cycles + 6 years. 
(60 cycles + 6 cycles + 6 years). 

Further ; in the lunar cycles of this period, the sun's gain 
is 66 weeks of months, and in the 6 years remainder it is 66 
days. Sixfold throughout ! a clear link of connection between 
the number of the Beast and his period. 

3. The dominion of the typical ancient Babylon over the 
typical Israel, lasted, as Clinton shows in his Chronology, accu- 
rately 66 solar years, for the remaining years of the Captivity 
wore under the Medo-Persian power. The dominion of the 
antitypical modern Babylon, over the antitypical Israel — over 
captive Christendom — endures for 66 lunar cycles, and 6 years. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 423 

Another link between the number and the period of the Beast 
dependent on great, and apparent utterly disconnected facts, 
in the realms of history and astronomy. 

4. It has been well said, that "history is prophecy," for 
all history has a tendency to repeat itself. But the saying is 
peculiarly true of Old Testament history. As Paul says of 
various incidents in the experience of Israel, " All these things 
happened unto them for ensamples (tvttol, types), and are written 
for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are 
come" (1 Cor. x. n). 

The literal Babylon was, as we have seen, a type of the 
spiritual Babylon — the Church of Rome ; and the great king 
of Babylon, the destroyer of the holy city and temple, the 
captor of the children of Judah, who set up a golden image 
of himself 60 cubits high and 6 broad on the plains of 
Dura, and commanded all peoples nations and languages to 
fall down and worship it, and cast into a burning fiery furnace 
the faithful witnesses who refused — Nebuchadnezzar, who 
was a very incarnation of human pride, is a marvellous type 
of that Papal dynasty which is symbolised by the " little 
horn," and by "the beast." The Pope is the self-exalting 
monarch of the modern Babylon, who on a far wider scale 
commands all nations, and people, and languages, to bow 
down and adore him, and condemned to the flames the saints 
of the Most High, who refused compliance. The type-portrait 
is too like to be mistaken ; it has had but one antitype, the 
man who sits in the temple of God, showing himself as a God 
on earth, and claiming the infallibility of Deity. We ask then 
what was tins period of this remarkably typical monarch, Nebu- 
chadnezzar ? 

Josephus "tells us it was forty-three years, and the famous 
astronomical canon of Ptolemy confirms the statement; as 
Clinton says, " The reign of Nebuchadnezzar is forty-three 
years, in all the copies of the canon of Ptolemy, and that 
number of years is also assigned to his reign by Berosus." 

Applying the same standard as before, we look eagerly to see 



424 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

what are the soli-lunar measures of this singularly typical reign, 
and again the fatal trinity of sixes meets our view ! The soli- 
lunar gain or epact in forty-three years is sixty-six weeks, and 
six days. 66 weeks + 6 days. 

5 . In considering the four hundred and ninety years' period, 
we observed, that whether regarded as consisting of true solar, 
or calendar lunar years, it equally afforded septiform results, 
when measured by soli-lunar epact. The elements of the 
calculation being different, the results are of course different, 
but both are septiform. 

Similarly, with the period now under consideration, we have 
this true testimony of two witnesses. The twelve hundred and 
sixty years, may be taken either as true solar, or as calendar 
lunar years, the epact measurement affords in either case, sixfold, 
not sevenfold, results. Treating them as true solar and lunar 
years, they are, as we have seen, 66 lunar cycles and 6 years. 
Treating them as prophetic, or calendar years, on the other 
hand, we find the gain of the true solar year in the whole 
period is 6606 days.* 

There is a very noteworthy circumstance connected with this 
last measurement, to which we must direct attention. We have 
in a previous chapter spoken of the Reformation of the calen- 
dar effected by Pope Gregory XIIL, a.d. 1582. But for the 
application to the period in question, of the more accurate 
measures of the solar year introduced by this Papal reformation 
of the calendar, the above results would have been hidden 
from view. The use of the old style Julian year, throws them 
out completely and make the solar gain in the 1260 years 
6615 days. This is because the Julian year of 365J days is 
slightly in excess of the true solar year, and the error accumu- 
lates in this period to about ten days. 

Now it will be remembered that Gregory XIII. cut off ten 
days from the year 1582, and commanded Christendom by a 



Accurately 6605 days and 7 hours, but in complete days, as above, 6606. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 425 

special Papal brief to count the 5th of October of that year as 
the 1 5th. In this he legislated back for 1260 years, thus changing 
times and laws for "a time, times, and the dividing of time," in 
remarkable agreement with the prophecy about the little horn. 

This arose in the following way. The first general or 
CEcumenical Council, that of Nice, a.d. 325, had legislated 
with reference to the time of the observance of Easter. 
Gregory XIII. assumed this Council as a starting-point ; and 
as the error of the old Julian year, had, in the interval which 
had elapsed since the Council, thrown the vernal equinox out, 
by about nine days and a half, he arbitrarily ordained the 
removal of ten days from the calendar, at the same time that 
he introduced regulations to avoid irregularities in future. 

Gregory XIII. died in a.d. 1585, exactly 1260 years after 
the Council of Nice, and his reformation of the calendar only 
came into use three years before his death, and that only 
in the Catholic countries which accepted it as a matter of 
course ; in Protestant Germany and Switzerland it did not take 
effect till a.d. 1700, and in England not till a.d. 1752. 

It is a singular coincidence, to say the least of it, that this 
chronological legislation, emanating from the Pope who sanc- 
tioned and struck a triumphant medal, in memory of the bloody 
massacre of the Protestants of France, on St. Bartholomew's 
day, should have removed from a period of 1260 years (dating 
from the first General Council following the rise of Imperial 
Christianity) the accumulated Julian error which concealed its 
true epact measures, and that he should thus have uninten- 
tionally uncovered, as attached to it, one more form of the 
triple six, so solemnly linking the period with the number ot 
the Beast. 

The downfall of the temporal power of the Papacy is the 
event marking the close of this period of 1260 years, just as the 
rise of the Papacy marked its beginning ; and it is evident that 
neither of these events happened in a year, or indeed in a cen- 
tury. " Rome was not built in a day," it is commonly said; and 
assuredly the Roman Catholic Church did not burst full-blown 



426 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

on the world. It rose into power gradually as the old Roman 
empire decayed and passed away ; it had various marked crises 
of rise, and hence its great period of 1260 years, must have analo- 
gous successive termini, earlier and later, exactly as in the case 
of the Captivity era. The earliest possible conclusion of the 
period, is the epoch of the Reformation. Up to that time the 
saints had been delivered into the hand of this persecuting 
power without exception, and without appeal, or redress. 
Then, and thenceforward, a very considerable portion of Chris- 
tendom was delivered from its spiritual and temporal oppression 
and tyranny. From the Council of Nice to the full end of the 
Reformation movement may therefore, perhaps, be regarded 
as an initiatory 1260 years. 

The chronological legislation of Gregory XIII. , took place 
at the close of this period, and corrected the error that had 
accumulated since its commencement. Sixtus V., who died 
five years after Gregory (a.d. 1590), was "the last pope who 
rendered himself formidable to European courts." From his 
time, to the present, Papal power has been passing through 
its period of decline and fall, just as from the fourth to the end 
of the sixth centuries, the system of the apostasy was gradu 
ally rising and developing into the Papacy. 

A second and more evident and accurate measurement, is 
found by dating the 1260 years from the Edict of Justinian, 
which constituted the Bishop of Rome " the head of all the 
Churches" a.d. 533. This date of the terminus a quo, gives as 
the terminus ad quem a.d. 1793, the time of the French Re- 
volution, in the course of which, as we have seen, the Pope 
was carried captive from Rome, and the Papal power received 
a tremendous shock, from which it never fully rallied. 

But the main reckoning of the period is unquestionably be- 
tween the chronologic limits a.d. 606 and 1866-70, the former 
being the date at which the title of Pope, or universal bishop, 
was, by the Emperor Phocas, conferred upon Boniface III., 
and the latter, that of the overthrow of Austria and France, 
and the consequent loss of the last vestige of temporal power, by 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY, 427 

Pius IX., when Victor Emmanuel moved his court to the 
Quirinal, and became sole king of united Italy. Then, and 
never quite till then, the Papacy, as a temporal power — a horn 
— ceased toT^mi^^ As a religion, it is destined to continue 
till the second advent 6f*6h»st, when the Lord will destroy it 
" with the brightness of his coming." The Beast is to be cast 
alive into the lake of fire, and therefore to be still in existence 
at the Epiphany. 

To sum up : 1260 years, the foretold and fulfilled period of 
Papal domination in Christendom, and of the temporal politi- 
cal power of the Popes of Rome, has the following remarkable 
astronomic measures. 

1260 years is 6 + 6 + 6 soli-lunar 70-year cycles ; 

1260 years is 66 lunar cycles + 6 years. 

1260 years have 6606 days of epact. 

The 43-years type of the period of the Beast — the reign of 

Nebuchadnezzar, — whose image was 60 cubits high and 

6 broad, — has 

66 weeks + 6 days of epact. 

This period is then bound by multiplied links to the number 
of the Beast, 666. And it is thus linked by hidden connections, 
not obvious ones ; by great unobserved soli-lunar cycles, not 
by months and years of conspicuous recurrence ; linked there- 
fore by the Hand that upholds the stars in their courses, by 
the Providence that orders all the events of history, and by the 
Mind that inspired the Apocalypse, and communicated to the 
man greatly beloved, the secrets of this " time of the end.' 7 
" Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of 
the world." 



The Two Thousand Three Hundred Years (Dan. viii.). 

ct And out of one of them [i.e., one of the four kingdoms into which the 
empire of Alexander the Great was divided] came forth a little horn, which 



428 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

waxed exceeding great, toward the south and toward the east, and toward the 
pleasant land. And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven : and it cast 
down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon 
them. Yea, he magnified himself even to the Prince of the host, and by 
him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was 
cast down. And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by 
reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground ; and it 
practised, and prospered. Then I heard one saint speaking, and another 
saint said unto that certain saint which spake, [or to that wonderful numberer], 
How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the making 
desolate [margin], to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden 
under foot ? And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred 
days [or evening-morning] ; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. . . . 
I will make thee know what shall be in the last end of the indignation : for 
at the time appointed the end shall be. ... In the latter time of 
their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a kingoffieree 
countenance, and understanding dark sentences shall stand up. And his power 
shall be mighty, but not by his own power : and he shall destroy wonder- 
fully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the 
holy people. And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in 
his hand ; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall 
destroy many : he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes ; but 
he shall be broken without hand. . . . Shut thou up the vision; for it 
shall be for many days. " 

In the year 553 B.C., the third year of the reign of Bel- 
shazzar, and about fifteen years before his subjugation by 
Darius the Mede, there was granted to Daniel a third great 
symbolic vision, that of the ram and the he-goat, affording a 
fuller glance than .the previous one, at the history of the second 
and third of the four great monarchies. 

Given as it was at a time when the Babylonian Empire and 
Captivity were both rapidly drawing to a close, this vision 
naturally unfolds God's providence with regard to Israel and 
Palestine, under the Medo-Persian and Grecian empires. 
The symbols shown to Daniel prefigured tkeir history with 
graphic accuracy : the successive rise of the two horns of the 
ram, foreshowing the sway of the two dynasties, which were 
afterwards merged in the great Medo-Persian monarchy ; the 
he-goat from the west, — with his rapid course, great strength; 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 429 

wide dominion, and notable horn, abruptly broken, in the 
plenitude of the goat's power, and replaced by four notable 
horns, — prefiguring to the life the locality of origin, the cha- 
racter, the course of conquest, and subsequent history of the 
Macedonian or Greek empire of Alexander the Great, as well 
as its fourfold division consequent on his permature death. In 
twelve brief years that European monarch overran and sub- 
dued all the fairest provinces of Asia ; and no sooner had he 
reached the zenith of power than he died, and his empire, after 
a period of confusion, was divided (subsequently to the battle 
of Ipsus), among the four kings, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysima- 
chus, and Cassander. 

From one of these kingdoms, the prophecy foretells that 
there would arise in the latter time a little horn which would 
ultimately wax " exceeding great," greater apparently than the 
" notable horn " itself, which is said to wax only " very great." 

This " little horn " is evidently a fellow to the " little horn " 
of the previous vision, only it rises, not amid the ten kingdoms 
of the Roman earth, but from one of the four branches of 
Alexander's Greek Empire. These four were, the Syrian king- 
dom of the Seleucidae, the Macedonian kingdom of Cassan- 
der, the Egyptian kingdom of Ptolemy, and the kingdom of 
Lysimachus, which included Thrace, Bithynia, and other 
parts of Asia. It was from the kingdom of Ptolemy, as we 
shall see presently, that this little horn arose. The direction of 
the early conquests of this singular power, are distinctly given, 
"toward the south, toward the east, and toward the pleasant 
land." The main features of his conduct, as described in the 
vision, are his self-exaltation against the Prince of princes, 
his persecution of the saints, his taking away the daily sacrifice, 
and defiling the sanctuary, and his casting down the truth to 
the ground. 

While beholding the vision, Daniel heard the question asked 
of the "Wonderful Numberer" who made the revelation (ap- 
parently the Lord Himself), " How long shall be the vision 
concerning the daily sacrifice, and the making desolate, to give 



43o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot ? " 
And it is in answer to this question, that the period we are con- 
sidering is named. 

" Unto two thousand and three hundred days, then 
shall the sanctuary be cleansed/' 

Now, as this question was asked and answered before the 
close of the Captivity in Babylon, and when therefore the daily 
sacrifice and the sanctuary were not in existence, it is clear 
that this prediction of a second destruction, supposes a prior 
restoration. 

This predicted period of 2300 years, commences, therefore, 
at some point in the time of the restored national existe?ice, and 
ritual worship of the Jews, and includes the entire period of their 
subsequent dispersion, and of the desolation of the sanctuary; 
Its earliest possible starting point is the decree of Artaxerxes 
to restore and build Jerusalem ; and, reckoned thus, its open- 
ing portion is the "seventy weeks," and its second portion the 
1 8 10 years which follow, and end in a.d. 1844, tne terminus of 
so many prophetic times. (We previously mentioned that in 
this desolation period of 18 10 years, the gain of the solar year 
on the lunar is 666 months.) 

An important later starting point is the era of the Seleucidce, 
or the era of the founder of the great Syrian dynasty which 
included Antiochus Epiphanes, the first of the three powers re- 
ferred to in the prophecy, as defiling the sanctuary and causing 
the daily sacrifice to cease. Reckoned in lunar years from the 
era of the Seleucidae (and it should be remembered that the 
long Mohammedan period of desolation which it includes is 
measured by lunar years) it terminates in a.d. 1919-20, or 
just 75 years later on, than when reckoned in solar years from 
the decree of Artaxerxes. Thus reckoned in solar and in lunar 
years from these two most important starting points, it ter- 
minates first at the commencement and then at the close of the 
last 75 years of the great "seven times ?; of prophecy. 

The question may occur, if this prophecy embrace the whole 
period from the decree of Aitaxerxes to the yet future restora 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 431 

tion of Israel, why did the greatest event to take place in the 
course of those ages, — the first advent and death of Christ, — 
rind no place in the revelation ? The answer seems to be that 
the all-important coming and death of Messiah the Prince, and 
the events immediately subsequent, were to be fully treated in a 
revelation devoted entirely to themselves. They are similarly 
passed by in total silence, both in the vision of the four beasts, 
Chapter vii., and in that of the fourfold image, Chapter ii., 
though all three prophecies end with the second advent, or its 
connected events, the restoration of the throne to the seed of 
David, and the final cleansing of the sanctuary of Israel. 

The place of paramount importance in this prediction, is 
given to the career and actings of an Eastern " little horn ; " 
and our knowledge that the Papacy was the power predicted 
under the symbol of the Roman or Western " little horn ;; 
affords a clue to the meaning of this sister symbol. 

The whole range of prophecy presents two, and only two, 
" little horns \ " and the whole range of history presents two, and 
only two, powers, which exactly answer to the symbols ; powers 
which, small and insignificant at first, gradually acquire empire 
on the ground of religion, and wax exceeding great by so doing ; 
proudly oppose Christ, and fiercely persecute his people; 
repress and exterminate his truth ; enjoy dominion for many 
long centuries (during which they tread down Jerusalem, either 
spiritual or literal), and perish at last under the judgment of God. 

The Papacy does not stand out more distinctly as the great 
Apostasy of the West, than does Mohammedanism as the great 
parallel Apostasy of the East The one originated from within 
the Church, the other from without; but they rose together in 
the beginning of the seventh century ; they have run chrono- 
logically similar courses ; they have both based their empire on 
religious pretensions ; the one defiled and trampled down the 
Church, and the other defiled and trod down Jerusalem. In 
their life, they have been companion evils, and in their death 
they are not divided ; for the one has just expired, politically, 
and the power of the other is fast expiring. 



432 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

The Mohammedan power is, we think, unquestionably the 
main fulfilment of this symbol ; but it is almost equally clear 
that it had a precursive fulfilment, on a smaller scale, in the 
person and history of Antiochus Epiphanes. His career 
accords so closely with almost every feature of the prediction, 
as to leave little room for doubt that it was intended by the 
Holy Spirit, as one subject of the prophecy. For seventeen 
centuries all expositors, Jewish and Christian, held that the 
prophecy referred to Antiochus. The Books of Maccabees 
record his career with great detail, and trace in it, as does 
Josephus, the fulfilment of the predictions of this little horn. 
But Antiochus never waxed " exceeding great," he never 
" threw down the place of the sanctuary," though he took away 
the daily sacrifice ; and he lived too near the time when the 
prophecy was given, to be the full and proper fulfilment of it, 
seeing it is said of the vision, " it shall be for many days," " at 
the last end of the indignation." Besides this, the time of the 
desolation effected by Antiochus, — just three years, — does not 
in any way, or on any system, correspond with 2300 days ; so 
that we are driven to regard this, as one of those prophecies, 
which has undoubtedly had a double fulfilment," like Hosea 
xi. 1 ; or Psalm lxxii. Antiochus was a precursive little horn, 
Mohammedanism is the full and proper reality intended by the 
symbol. 

A certain freedom in the construction of terms must be 
allowed in the case of all such double predictions, because the 
Holy Spirit, having more than one event in view, and selecting 
for description mainly those features which are common to 
both, may also introduce some, peculiar to the one or to the 
other. 

Antiochus Epiphanes, the Romans, and the Mohammedans, 
have all taken part in accomplishing these predicted desolations 
of Jerusalem. The first two took away the daily sacrifice, the 
second cast down the sanctuary, all three have defiled the 
place of the sanctuary, and trodden it under foot, and by the 
last two especially have the " mighty and holy people " been 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 433 

" cast down," and " stamped upon," and " destroyed." But as 
the Roman power cannot be represented as " a little horn " 
arising out of one of the four kingdoms into which Alexander's 
empire was divided (Dan. viii. 9), whereas both Antiochus 
and Mohammed can, we conclude that they mainly are re- 
ferred to in the prediction, and especially the latter. 

It must be borne in mind that no sooner did the Roman 
Empire cease to tread down Jerusalem, than the Moslem 
power began to do so, and has continued to do so to this day. 
The utmost efforts of Christendom, expended in eight different 
crusades, failed to drive the Moslem out of the Holy Land ; 
for twelve centuries he has defiled the sanctuary, and stood up 
against the Prince of princes, casting down the truth to the 
ground, practising and prospering ; but it is written that when 
this period of 2300 years comes to an end, " he shall be 
broken without hand," and " then shall the sanctuary be 
cleansed." 

First, then, with reference to the earlier of the two termin- 
ations of the 2300 years already named : — 

B.C. 4^ 7 2300 years to the cleansing of the Sanctuary, a.D. 1 844,— 

Let it be remembered that all great movements have almost 
imperceptible commencements, just as great rivers spring from 
little brooks. Israel's restoration and the destruction of 
Mohammedan rule, i.e. " the cleansing of the sanctuary," are 
not events to be accomplished in a day or in a year, any more 
than the overthrow of the city and temple and national exist- 
ence of the Jewish people, was accomplished in a day or in a 
year. From Ephraim's earliest down to Judah's latest captivity, 
a hundred and sixty-eight years elapsed ; and similarly at the 
restoration, from the first edict of Cyrus to the second of 
Artaxerxes, ninety-two years elapsed. 

We need not marvel then to find that this greater restoration, 
from this more than thirty times longer dispersion, should appa- 
rently be destined to occupy a period of seventy-five years. In 
the year 1844, for the first time since the days of Mohammed, 

F F 



434 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

when the sanguinary laws of religious intolerance were enacted, 
the Turkish Sultan was obliged by the European powers, to 
relinquish the practice of executions for apostasy and to make a 
decree granting religious toleration* 

* An abstract of the Parliamentary papers on this subject is given, as 
follows, by Rev. Edward Bickersteth: — 

" The papers entitled ' Correspondence Relating to Executions in Turkey 
for Apostasy from Islamism,' were presented to Parliament, May 3, 1844, 
and having come before me through the kindness of Lord Ashley, I give 
the following abstract of them. The correspondence occupied a consider- 
able part of a year — from Aug. 27, 1843, to April 19, 1844. 

" The difficulties in the way were thus stated by the Grand Vizier, Aug. 
24, 1843 : 'The laws of the Koran compel no man to become a Mussul- 
man ; but they are inexorable, both as respects a Mussulman who embraces 
another religion, and as respects a person, not a Mussulman, who, after 
having of his own accord publicly embraced Islamism, is convicted of 
having renounced that faith. No consideration can produce a com- 
mutation OF THE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, TO WHICH THE LAW CON- 
DEMNS him without mercy. The only mode of escaping death is for the 
accused to declare that he has again become a Mussulman.' The same diffi- 
culties were pressed Dec. 1, 1843, when our Ambassador was assured, that 
although the Porte wished to avoid any recurrence of the atrocity, yet as such 
executions were obligatory under the law, considered by Mohammedans Divine, 
it would be embarrassing to give an official declaration. And again, Feb. 10, 
1844, the Ottoman Minister for Foreign Affairs drew a strong line of distinc- 
tion between custom and Divine law, intimating that a law prescribed by 
God Himself was not to be set aside by any human power ; and that the 
Sultan in attempting it might be exposed to a heavy, perhaps even a 
dangerous, responsibility. 

"The causes of this intervention of the European Powers are remark- 
able. In August, 1843, an Armenian youth, who after, under fear of 
punishment, becoming a Turk, had returned to his Christian faith, was 
put to death. This called for the interposition of our Government and 
its serious remonstrances, and produced in November, 1843, some promises 
of terminating such affairs without capital punishment. In December, how- 
ever, a young G*eek, who had become a Mussulman, having returned to 
his own creed as a Greek Christian, at Biligik, adjoining to Brussa, was 
executed. This taking place in the midst of the correspondence, called 
/orth Lord Aberdeen's decisive letter of Jan. 16. Thus we are indebted to 
the faithfulness of Greek 'and Armenian martyrs for this remarkable change. 
The energy put forth to accomplish this change required the concurrent 
exertions of the five European Powers — Austria, Prussia, France, Russia, 
and England. 

"The able despatch of Lord Aberdeen of Jan. 16, 1844, is peculiar, and 
vefy honourable to our country. It is as follows, — 

"'Despatch to Sir Stratford Canning, our Ambassador at the Porte, 
from the Earl of Aberdeen, 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY, 435 



From that date to the present time, a process of elevation 
and incipient restoration of Israel has been going on. It has 
been so quiet, so gradual, so unobtrusive, that few have noticed 
it ; the turn of the tide has taken place, but the current has 



a ( 



Foreign Office, January 16, 1844. 
Sir, — I have received your Excellency's despatch of the 17th of 
December, reporting that a Greek had been executed near Brussa as an 
apostate from Islamism, and enclosing a copy of the communication which 
you had directed Mr. Dragoman Frederick Pisani to make to the Porte in 
consequence of that transaction. 

" * I have to state to your Excellency that her Majesty's Government en- 
tirely approve the promptitude with which you acted on this occasion. But 
the repetition of the scene of this revolting kind so soon after that which 
had, in the course of last summer, excited the horror and indignation of 
Europe, evinces such total disregard, on the part of the Porte, for the feel- 
ings and remonstrances of the Christian Powers, that it is incumbent upon 
Her Majesty's Government, without loss of time, to convey their sentiments 
on the matter still more explicitly to the knowledge of the Porte. They 
take this course singly, and without waiting for the co-operation of the 
other Christian Powers, because they desire to announce to the Porte a 
determination which, though it doubtless will be concurred in by all, Great 
Britain is prepared to act upon alone. Her Majesty's Government feel, 
too, that they have an especial right to require to be listened to by the 
Porte on a matter of this nature ; for they can appeal to the justice and to 
the favour with which the vast number of Mohammedans subject to British 
rule are treated in India, in support of their demand that all persons, 
subjects of the Porte, and professing Christianity, shall be exempt from 
cruel and arbitrary persecution on account of their religion, and shall not be 
made the victims of a barbarous law, which it may be sought to enforce for 
their destruction. Whatever may have been tolerated in former times, by 
the weakness or indifference of Christian Powers, those Powers will now 
require from the Porte due consideration for their feelings as members of a 
religious community, and interested as such in the fate of all who, notwith- 
standing shades of difference, unite in a common belief in the essential 
doctrines of Christianity ; and they will not endure that the Porte should 
insult and trample on their faith by treating as a criminal any person who 
embraces it. Her Majesty's Government require the Porte to abandon, once 
for all, so revolting a principle. They have no wish, to humble the 
Porte by imposing upon it an unreasonable obligation ; but as a Christian 
government, the protection of those who profess a common belief with 
themselves, from persecution or oppression, on that account alone, by their 
Mohammedan rulers, is a paramount duty with them, and one from which 
they cannot recede. Your Excellency will therefore press upon the Turkish 
Government, that if the Porte has any regard for the friendship of England 
— if it has any hope that, in the hour of peril or of adversity, that protection, 
which has more than once saved it from destruction, will be extended to it 
again, it must renounce absolutely, and without equivocation, the barbarous 
practice which has called forth the remonstrance now addressed to it. Your 



436 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

not yet set sufficiently strongly in the other direction, to attract 
attention, yet the careful observer cannot fail to note the evi- 
dent and rapid fall of Turkey and the incipient revival of Pal- 
estine. Jerusalem has not yet ceased to be trodden under 

Excellency "will require an early answer; and you will let the Turkish 
Ministers understand that if that answer does not fully correspond with the 
expectations which Her Majesty's Government entertain, your Excellency 
is instructed to seek an audience of the Sultan, and to explain to his High- 
ness, in the most forcible terms, the feelings of the British Government, 
and the consequences, so injurious to Turkey, which a disregard for those 
feelings will involve. Her Majesty's Government are so anxious for the 
continuance of a good understanding with Turkey, and that the Porte 
should entitle itself to their good offices in the hour of need, that they wish 
to leave no expedient untried before they shall be compelled to admit the 
conviction that all their interest and friendship is misplaced, and that 
nothing remains for them but to look forward to, if not promote the arrival 
of, the day when the force of circumstances shall bring about a change 
which they will have vainly hoped to procure from the prudence and 
humanity of the Porte itself. 

" ' Your Excellency will seek an interview with the Reis Effendi, and 
having read to him this despatch, leave a copy of it, with an accurate 
translation, in his hands. 

" ■ I am, etc., (Signed) Aberdeen.' " 

Count Xesselrode's despatch of February 27, 1844, on the part of the 
Russian Government, is instructive as opening out the weakness of the 
Ottoman Government. "It is the Emperor's intention that you should 
declare to the Ottoman Porte, in the form of friendly counsel, that we 
positively expect no longer to witness executions which array against it the 
indignation of all Christendom. It is with a view to its own interest, that 
we address to it this demand. The Porte must not delude itself with 
regard to the elements now in a state of fermentation in Turkey. Instead 
of alienating from itself the feelings of the Christian population, the Ottoman 
Government ought more than ever to labour to conciliate them to itself." 

The magnitude of the question is thus forcibly stated, February 22, 1844, 
by the Turkish minister. ' ' Xo fresh step was requisite to make us sensible 
of the importance of this question, with which we are deeply impressed. 
We are dealing with it with all the seriousness and all the care which its 
gravity requires. Yes, what your respective chiefs say is true ; this ques- 
tion has its political as also its religious side. It is requisite, in fact, that 
we should separate ourselves from the nation, or otherwise from the Chris- 
tian Powers ; those are two great evils to be equally avoided. The Sultan 
has commanded that this question shall be discussed in the council of 
Oulemas, which will be opened on next Saturday, at the Sheik-ul-Islam's, 
to which the Gazi-Askes, and the other principal persons among the men 
of the law will be summoned ; after which the council of ministers will 
again apply themselves to it. Do not suppose, however, that we have 
confined ourselves to directing their attention, purely and simply, to the 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 437 

foot • but what of the two great Powers which for eighteen 
hundred years (with a few brief intervals) have successively- 
trodden her down — Rome, and the various forms of that Mo- 
hammedan power, whose present head is Turkey ? 



question as it regards religion ; we have likewise submitted to them the 
protocols of the conferences, the despatches of the two Governments, and 
even the extracts of the newspapers which have discussed this question ; 
and we shall likewise communicate to them the instructions which you 
have just delivered to me, and which, although superfluous as far as the 
Porte is concerned, may still add to the impression produced by the other 
documents in their hands." 

In communicating the Queen's approbation, April 19, 1844, to Sir 
Stratford Canning, Lord Aberdeen ends the correspondence with these 
words, " You have brought to a successful close a question of which the 
importance cannot be too highly rated." Events will show the truth of 
these words. 

The Porte, even on the 14th of March, 1844, would have put off the 
European Powers with a statement that the law did not admit of any 
change ; but such measures as were possible should be taken. The Am- 
bassadors of the European Powers refused to receive this. 

At length, on the 21st March, 1844, the question of religious execution 
was, as our Ambassador observes, "happily and, to all appearance, con- 
clusively settled. The concession has been obtained with great difficulty ; 
and even to the last moment it required the firmness of resolution, inspired 
by your Lordship's instructions, to overcome the obstacles which were 
raised against us." 

He inclosed in this letter the following ' ' Official Declaration of the 
Sublime Porte, relinquishing the practice of Executions for Apostasy." 

(Translation.) 

" It is the special and constant intention of His Highness the Sultan that 
his cordial relations with the High Powers be preserved, and that a perfect 
reciprocal friendship be maintained, and increased. 

" The Sublime Porte engages to take effectual measures to 
prevent henceforward the execution and putting to death 
of the Christian who is an apostate. 

" March 21, 1844." 

To this must be added the following ' ' Declaration of His Highness the 
Sultan to Sir Stratford Canning, at his audience on the 22nd of March, 
1844. 

" Henceforward neither shall Christianity be insulted in my dominions, 
nor shall Christians be in any way persecuted for their religion." 

" The date of the official declaration, March 21, is very remarkable as 
being in fact the first day of Nisan, the first sacred month of the Jews. 
And this is the more remarkable, as it is connected with the ter- 
mination OF THE REMARKABLE DATE OF 23OO YEARS." 

"It will be observed that Ezra is very specific in stating the dates 



438 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Rome trod down Jerusalem in the days of Titus, and Turkey 
holds her down now. " Rome cast her to the ground, and 
when she was down, Turkey set its foot on her neck. Rome 
hurled her to the dust, Turkey trampled her in the mire \ Rome 

B.C. 457. On the first day of the first month began he to go up from Baby- 
lon (Ezra vii. 9) B.C. 457. And they made an end with all the men that 
had taken strange wives by the first day of the first month (Ezra x. 17). 
The whole time of the return and restoration taking exactly a year." 

The prophecy of this period is in these words (Dan. viii. 13, 14): "How 
long shall be the vision of the daily sacrifice, and of the transgression of 
desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under 
foot ? And he said unto me, unto two thousand and three hundred days 
(or evenmg-morning) ; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." (For the 
proof of this being the period of 2300 years, the reader is referred to Bilks' 
"Elements of Prophecy," pp. 356-363.) Ezra's commission for the 
restoration of the sacrifice (Ezra vii. 15 ; viii. 35) was 457 years B.C. The 
period of a year was occupied hi his return, and the cleansing of the 
sanctuary, that is to B.C. 456 (Ezra vii. 9; x. 17.) The restoration of 
sacrifice continued with slight exceptions, to the destruction of Jerusalem 
by the Romans, since which Jerusalem has been trodden down of the Gen- 
tiles, to the period of March 21, 1844 ; this period, according to the Jewish 
year, ending March 20, 1844, makes 2300 years; and on the 1st of Nisan, 
1844, the power of the Mohammedans to persecute Christianity passed 
away, and liberty is given for Christian worship, the true cleansing of the 
sanctuary. This is the more remarkable also as this is the 
1260th year of the Hegira (the date fixed by the Mohammedan Anti- 
christ as the rise of this branch of the Apostasy) and so the closing year in 
Mohammedanism of that remarkable prophetical period, 1260 years. In 
a letter from Tangiers, dated June 20th, 1844, given in the public journals, 
speaking of the difficulties besetting the kingdom of Morocco, it is stated, 
'• It seems that the Moors have always had forebodings of this year. For 
a long time they have been exhorting each other to beware of 1260 (that is, 
of the Hegira), which according to our reckoning is the present year." 

"It was a common remark in Egypt in 1839, 'The spirit of the Arab 
is gone.' Events in Sidon, Acre, Persia, India, Afghanistan, Bokhara, 
Algiers, illustrate the same view." 

"Another material point connected with this event is the passing away of 
the Turkish Woe. It is the general voice of Christian interpreters, that 
the sixth angel sounding the second Woe Trumpet, describes the Turkish 
Woe. We have in this event a most remarkable feature of the ending of 
that woe. The importance of this fact will be seen by the prophecy 
(Rev. ii. 14-18), 'The second woe is past; and behold, the third woe 
cometh quickly. And the seventh angel sounded ; and there were great 
voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the king- 
doms of our Lord, and his Christ, and He shall reign for ever ; ' and 
immediately associated with this is the coming of God's wrath, and the 
time of the dead that they shall be judged. We are therefore clearly on 
the verge of these great events." — Bickersteth, "Guide to the Prophecies" 
Ninth Edition, p. 344. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 439 

destroyed God's temple and ploughed up the sacred site on 
which it stood, Turkey maintains the Mosque of Omar on 
that sacred site ; and on the holy hill where Abraham offered 
Isaac, where David offered the oxen of Araunah, where Solo- 
mon built his temple, and where the Lord Jesus, the Son of 
David, cast out all that was unholy, there, by Turkish authority 
now stands a Mohammedan mosque, and there no Jew is per- 
mitted even to set his foot." * 

But Pagan Rome passed away long since, and Papal Rome 
is no longer a political power in the earth ; the first oppressor 
is gone, and Turkey, the second, is fast going. " The foot of 
the sick man is the only one now remaining on the neck of 
Jerusalem, and the sick man is dying; when he dies, why 
should not Jerusalem arise and be free ? " Every step in the 
downfall of Turkey, is a step in the direction of the cleansing 
of the sanctuary, and these steps are in our day succeeding 
each other rapidly. Since 182 1, Turkey has lost Greece and 
Servia, Moldavia and Wallachia, Morocco, Algeria, and Egypt ; 
and now in the recent war, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. 
The once mighty Ottoman Empire is in Europe practically ex- 
tinct. Its power in Asia is also seriously diminished, and not- 
ably so in Syria. Aliens, or non- Mussulmans, are now allowed 
to hold landed property in Palestine, and the number of Jews 
resident in their own land is every year on the increase. Thou- 
sands of intelligent Christians visit its shores annually, and the 
Palestine Exploration has completed a survey of its every square 
mile. " Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour 
the dust thereof." There is every sign, when the present is 
contrasted with the past, that the time for the complete libera- 
tion of Palestine from Moslem tyranny is at hand. 

The second starting-point from which these 2300 years may 
be dated is the era of the Seleucidse, b.c 312. The Seleucidce 
were the race of monarchs (descended from Seleucus Nicator, 
one of the four notable horns of the he-goat,) from which 
Antiochus Epiphanes sprung. 

* " Rome, Turkey, and Jerusalem," by Canon Hoare. 



44© DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

as this era of the seleucid2e, long used by the jews 
themselves, and still employed by the nestorians and 
other Eastern nations, is dated from the great foun- 
der OF THE DYNASTY OF THE PRECURSORY " LITTLE HORN," it 

is not an unsuitable point of departure. The period of 2300 
years measured from it, and reckoned in lunar years, runs out 
in a.d. 1919-20, seventy-five years later than its first termin- 
ation in 1844, and the same year as the main measurement of 
the Times of the Gentiles, dated from Nebuchadnezzar's over- 
throw of Jehoiakim, B.C. 602. 

BC ? T C 2 3°° LUNAR YEARS FROM THE ERA OF THE SELEUCID^ A J) IQIQ— 20 

It remains to show that the soli-lunar measures of 2300 years 
assign to it a place in the great septiform series of prophetic 
times. 

The sun gains on the moon in this vast period of twenty- 
three centuries seventy lunar years and seven months.* 

2520 Years, or "Seven Times" (Dan. iv.). 

As we have already considered this period pretty fully (p. 341) 
as to its distinctive moral characteristics, and as to its historical 
chronological features (p. 369), we need in this place dwell 
only on its arithmetical peculiarities and astronomic measures. 
It is the great dispensational week, the arc of time which spans 
alike each of the three moral divisions of human history ; it is 
the period of the fourfold image of Gentile rule, which is to 
introduce the everlasting kingdom of the Son of God. It is 
the most important of all the prophetic periods, and the oft- 
repeated 1260 years of the Apostasy, is its second half. 



* The accuracy of these measures is very striking. In 2300 years there 
is a remainder of one year over and above 121 lunar cycles ; and the 
solar gain of this one year, just makes up for the loss occasioned by the 
121 repetitious of the small error of the lunar cycle, so that the solar 
gain is as stated above, within less than a quarter of a day ; 2300 years is, 
in fact, as we have before said, the most perfect secular soli-lunar cycle 
known. 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 441 

With regard to it we note in the first place, that 2520 is 
arithmetically a most remarkable number; a number as dis- 
tinct from all other numbers as the circle is from all other 
forms. It is not a number that could possibly have been 
selected by chance, or put inadvertently into the important 
position it occupies in the prophetic word. Its selection in 
preference to all other numbers, is an indication of intelligent 
design which candour cannot fail to recognise. The omniscient 
God has deliberately passed by all other conceivable numbers, 
any one of which might have been made the basis of chronologic 
prophecy, that He might select, to occupy this position, a 
number which is sui generis, altogether unique, one which 
stands forth by its very nature as a king among other numbers, 
conspicuous and paramount. 2520 is the least common multiple 
of the first ten numbers ; in other words, it is the first in the 
entire series of numbers, that is exactly divisible by all the 
first ten numerals. 

2520 times without remainder. 
1260 
840 
6 3o 
504 
420 
360 

3i5 
280 

2 52 

Now ten, be it remembered, is a natural numerical radix, 
employed in Scripture and in world-wide use, so that the first 
ten numbers form a complete and fundamental series, and their 
least common multiple is a great fundamental number in 
arithmetic. 

It is like a complex crystal, capable, from its very nature, of 
numerous regular divisions, and it is adapted to harmonize in one 
several series of periods of different orders and magnitudes, in 
a way that no other conceivable number could do. Is it by 



I 


is contained in it 


2 


j? 


3 


» 


4 


jj 


5 


?> 


6 


5? 


7 


» 


8 


J> 


9 


)J 


10 


»1 



442 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

chance that this is the number of years of the great " seven 
times," which is the vertebral column of prophetic chronology ? 
Further: perfect arithmetically, 2520 years is also perfect 
astronomically. It contains 132 lunar or Metonic cycles, in 
which the epact amounts to — 

seventy-seven lunar years. 

Over and above these cycles there is a remainder of twelve 
years, which raises the epact of the entire period to — 

seventy-five solar years. 

Now, here we are confronted with another startling fact, a 
fact which it will puzzle the ingenuity of sceptics to account 
for, a fact which must have been unknown to Daniel, for the 
state of astronomic science in his day (nearly six centuries 
B.C.), was such that he could not have been acquainted with 
it ; yet a fact which is absolutely indisputable, and which a very 
short calculation will demonstrate. In the last chapter of 
Daniel the angel intimates to the prophet in answer to his 
chronological inquiries, that while the scattering of the power 
of the holy people, should terminate at the end of the second 
half of the 2520 years, yet that there should be additions of thirty 
and forty-five years, before the era of full blessedness would 
arrive. (Dan. xii. n-13.) In other words, to the long period 
of 2520 years Scripture adds a brief period of seventy-five years, 
and as we have just seen, astronomy does the same. The 
difference between 2520 true lunar and the same number of 
true solar years is seventy-five years. In other words, the 
seventy-five years added in the prophecy is exactly equal to 
the epact of the whole " seven times." If 2520 lunar, and the 
same number of solar years begin together, the former will run 
out seventy-five years before the latter. The seventy-five years 
added to the " Times of the Gentiles " are equal to the epact 
of that great dispensational period. 

Was it by chance that Daniel lit upon these two periods, so 
widely dissimilar, and which yet bear to each other this remark- 
able astronomic relation ? Impossible ! as impossible as that he 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 443 

could either have known that 2300 years (Chap, viii.) was a 
soli-lunar cycle, or that he could have selected by chance the 
exact number of years in that cycle, as the period of the re- 
stored temple and subsequent desolation of the sanctuary. Such 
coincidences are not the work of chance. Such Bible state- 
ments must be accepted with reverential awe, as evidences that 
the Divine mind which planned the universe, inspired also the 
sacred Book. 

In these added seventy-five years, having this peculiar astro- 
nomic character, we see also one of those evidently intentional 
elements of uncertainty which meet us so frequently in chrono- 
fogic prophecy. Just as it would be impossible, prior to 
fulfilment, to say which of several probable eras was the real 
commencing era of the seventy years captivity, and hence of 
the " Times of the Gentiles," so it is impossible in this case to 
decide, whether these added seventy-five years are to have an 
inclusive fulfilment in 2520 solar years, or an added fulfilment, 
or both. Regarding the 2520 years as lunar, and dating them 
from 598 B.C., which, as we have seen, is the latest com- 
mencement of the " Times of the Gentiles," they terminated 
a.d. 1848, and we are now living in the interval created by the 
inequality of solar and lunar movements during the lapse of 
the whole " seven times." 

But if the 2520 years be regarded as solar years, and dated 
from the same commencing era, they do not terminate, as we 
have seen, until a.d. 1923, and the concluding seventy-five 
years may possibly be added to that date. But the pro- 
phecy implies an end at the beginning of this supplementary 
seventy-five years; a fuller and more blessed end at the 
close of their first section — 30 years (a month) of years ; and 
the fullest and most blessed terminal point at the close of the 
supplementary forty-five years ; that is, at the close of the whole 
seventy-five. What mysteries are here indicated who shall say ? 
The full establishment of Messiah's kingdom on earth may, 
even after his glorious epiphany, be a work of time. The down- 
fall of the " little horn " seems to be the event presented in 



444 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

the prophecy as marking the first close. No events at all are 
assigned to the other two chronological points. They are 
simply indicated, and a character of final blessedness is stamped 
on the last ; but this is all. It is vain to speculate where Scrip- 
ture affords no clue. " The secret things belong unto God, 
but the things that are revealed to us and our children." 

"Twelve Hundred and Ninety Days" (Dan. xii. n). 

We must briefly glance at the two periods of thirty years and 
forty-five years, by which the main period of 1260 years, the 
latter half of the " Times of the Gentiles," is lengthened. 

The glorious One, who makes this final revelation to Daniel, 
swears by Him that liveth for ever and ever, that " time, times, 
and half a time," 1260 years, should bring to an end the 
scattering of the holy people, and the " wonders " of judgment 
which had been foretold to the prophet. Daniel, longing to 
know more, inquires, " O my Lord, what shall be the end of 
these things ? " The answer is a refusal at that time to reveal 
more, or make plainer what had been revealed, coupled with an 
intimation that in the time of the end the prophecy should be 
better understood. " Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are 
closed up and sealed till the time of the end." In the mean- 
time he is assured that the blessed sanctifying work of God in 
individual souls would go on, in spite of national apostasies and 
the machinations of the Evil One. " Many shall be purified, 
and made white, and tried, but the wicked shall do wickedly ; 
none of the wicked shall understand " (these prophecies appa- 
rently), " but the wise shall understand." And then the great 
Revealer adds one or two further mysterious chronological 
hints, evidently designed for the guidance of the saints at the 
time of the end, which show plainly, what the analogy of the 
Captivity period not indistinctly intimates, that the time of the 
end, brief as it is when compared with the " time, times, and 
a half," and very brief when compared with the whole "seven 
times," is yet a period, and not a point — a course of years, not 
a crisis ; that the full end is to come gradually, not suddenly 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 445 

Thus the rising and falling of the Waters of the flood were 
gradual ; the enslaving and the redeeming of Abraham's seed 
from Egyptian bondage were gradual ; the downfall of Jewish 
monarchy was by stages, and the final expulsion of the Jews 
from their land was equally gradual and by stages. These 
closing verses of Daniel prove beyond a doubt that the eleva- 
tion of Israel, and the introduction of millennial blessedness, 
will also be gradual, and that marked stages will occur in its 
course. 

" From the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, 
and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall 
be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is he 
that waiteth and cometh to the thousand three hundred and 
five and thirty days." 

The remarkable feature about these two closing chronologi- 
cal statements is, that they name no terminal event ; the former 
does not even suggest any ; the latter only implies that its close 
will introduce the era of blessedness. The emphatic " blessed 
is he that waiteth and cometh " to it, recalls the " Blessed and 
holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection," of Rev. xx. ; 
and we may probably assume that the 1335 days is, in the 
fullest sense, "the end," to which the Angel alludes in his 
closing words ; " Go thou thy way till the end be, for thou 
shalt rest (in death), and stand (in resurrection) in thy lot at 
the end of the days " {i.e., of these 1335 days, or years). 

In considering the 1290 years, we note that it passes beyond 
the limits of the primary period by thirty years, or one pro- 
phetic month. 

As no event marking its close is given, in the prophecy, it is 
impossible to decide whether it is to be added to the earlier or 
to the later close of the " seven times," and its second half, the 
1260 years of the domination of the Desolator. 

Astronomically, thirty years is a soli-lunar cycle in ivhich tJu 
solar year and the lunar month agree within a day. 

In the whole 1290 years the epact amounts to the septiform 
period of 2004 weeks, or 14,028 days. 



446 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

Thirteen Hundred and Thirty-five Days (Dan. xii. 12). 

Forty-five years more 'are in ver. 12 added to 1290, making 
1335 years, carrying us seventy-five years beyond the termina- 
tion of the Times of the Gentiles, and introducing the era of 
full blessedness. 

An analogous forty-five years terminated in the inheritance 
of the typical rest of Canaan. It will be remembered that 
Caleb, when appealing to Joshua to give him the promised 
possession, said, " The Lord hath kept me alive these forty 
and five years, ever since the Lord spake this word unto 
Moses, w r hile the children of Israel wandered in the wilder- 
ness, and now I am this day fourscore and five years old . . . 
Now therefore give me this mountain whereof the Lord spake 
in that day. And Joshua blessed him, and gave unto Caleb 
the son of Jephunneh, Hebron for an inheritance, and the land 
had rest from war" (Josh. xiv. 10-13). 

Forty-five years was also a terminal period in the history of 
the Jewish dispensation. Our Lord's crucifixion took place in 
the year a.d. 29, and his ministry began 3 J years previously, 
or in the year a.d. 25 ; the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus 
was in the year a.d. 70, forty-five years from the commence- 
ment of our Lord's ministry. 

The soli-lunar measures of this brief terminal period are 
strikingly septiform. During its course the sun gains on the 
moon seventy weeks, or 490 days. 

In the whole period of "1335 days," or years, there are 
seventy lunar cycles, and five years over. The epact of 
these five years is 54 to 55 days, from which the slight error 
of the lunar cycle has to be deducted. In 1335 years this 
error amounts to nearly a week ; the result is, that the solar 
gain during the whole 1335 years is seventy weeks of months, 
and seven weeks of days. 

Measured by the prophetic, or calendar year, the solar gain 
on the calendar year of 360 days in the 1335 years is a thou- 
sand weeks. 



SOU-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 447 

Two Thousand Five Hundred and Ninety-five Years. 

These two brief periods of thirty and forty-five years make 
together 75 years, and are added to the second half of the 
great "seven times" of prophecy; if we consider them as 
added to the whole "seven times," or 2520 years, they raise 
that period to 2595 years. 

We may therefore, in closing, glance at the astronomic 
measures of this period. It contains 136 lunar cycles, and 
the solar gain over the lunar year in this period, is 

seventy-seven solar years. 
In other words, this comprehensive period consists of 

seventy-seven soli-lunar cycles. 
There is a remainder of eleven years, which — minus the ac- 
cumulations of the small error of the lunar cycle — gives an 
additional septiform solar gain of fourteen weeks, making the 
epact of the whole accurately 

seventy-seven solar years, and twice seven weeks. 

Grouping together the epacts of the prophetic times, we 
observe among them a striking similarity, and indications of 
the existence of some underlying law inviting research.* 

I. Epacts of the Prophetic Times, as measured by 
True Solar and Lunar Years. 

Prophetic Times. Epacts. 

45 years . Seventy weeks of days. 
65 „ . Seven hundred and seven days. 
490 „ . Twice seven solar years, and seven months. 
1290 „ . Twice seven thousand and four times seven 

days (two thousand and four weeks). 
1335 „ . Seventy weeks of months, and seven weeks of 

days. 
2300 „ . Seventy lunar years, and seven months. 



* See Appendix A. 



448 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

2520 years . Seventy-five solar years. 

2595 „ . Seventy-seven solar years, and twice seven 

weeks. 
1000 „ . A month of solar years. 
1260 „ . Sixty-six weeks of months, and sixty days. 
1810 „ . Six hundred and sixty-six months. 

II. Epacts of the Prophetic Times, as measured by 
the Prophetic, or Calendar Year of 360 Days. 

Prophetic Times. Epacts. 

70 years . One calendar year and one week. 
490 „ . Seven calendar years and seven weeks. 
1335 „ . A thousand weeks. 
2300 „ . Thirty-three solar years. 
1000 „ . Twice seven calendar years and seven months. 
1260 „ . Thrice six calendar years, and thrice six 
weeks ; or six thousand six hundred and 
six days. 



CHAPTER V. 

SOLI-LUNAR MEASURES OF OUR LORD'S EARTHLY LIFETIME, 
AND OF HUMAN HISTORY AS A WHOLE. 

WE have shown in the foregoing chapters, that the lead- 
ing prophetic times are accurate astronomic cycles, — 
cycles not remote from terrestrial affairs, but connected with 
our ordinary calendar measurements of time — cycles harmoniz- 
ing, more or less perfectly, the unequal yet intimately related 
solar and lunar revolutions. 

We have also shown that the epacts of these prophetic times 
form, with one peculiar exception, a remarkable series of septi- 
form periods or weeks, of years, months, weeks, and days ; 
and that, in the one instance where it is not septiform, the 
epact assumes a strikingly sixfold character, in harmony with 
the sixfold number, attached by Divine inspiration to the power 
of which that period is the duration. 

These prophetic times become in due course historic times; 
and the question naturally arises, Will this principle of 
epact measurement yield analogous results, when extended to 
other historic times, and to the whole chronology of human 
history ? 

In what follows we must endeavour to show that it does, 
and that a marvellous law of harmonious proportion is clearly 
observable between the chronology of certain types of the 
course of redemption history and that of the actual events 
typified — the reality being to the chronological type, not as a 
year to a day, but as a soli-lunar cycle to a day. And what is 
still more remarkable is that this cycle — a cycle whose epact 
is exactly one solar year, measures the most important period 

G G 



45o DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

in all human history — the earthly lifetime of our Lord Jesus 
Christ* 

We ask special attention to this statement. The evidence 
which justifies it amounts — not to demonstration, for the 
nature of the case forbids this — but to so high a degree of 
probability, as to be almost moral certainty, and the fact, if it 
be such, is a deeply interesting and important one, indicating 
another underlying link of connection between the assertions of 
Scripture history, and the phenomena of astronomic science. 

A brief consideration of the statements of the New Testa- 
ment on the period in question is needful here. 

We learn from St. Luke that at the time of his baptism, 
when the Holy Ghost, in bodily shape like a dove, descended 
on Him to anoint Him for his ministry, and when the voice 
from heaven proclaimed Him the beloved Son of God, " Jesus 
Himself began to be about thirty years of age." 

His -entrance on his career of public service to God at this 
age, was in accordance with the principles of the Levitical 
Law, and with the practice of the Levites. Thirty years of age 
is the time of mental, moral and physical maturity — a man's 
prime. " From thirty years old and upward, until fifty years old, 
shalt thou number them," was the law respecting the Levites, 
" all that enter in to perform the service, to do the work in the 
tabernacle of the congregation." This is seven times reiter- 
ated in the fourth of Numbers (vv. 3, 23, 30, 35, 39, 43, 47). 

David a type of the Messiah, began to reign at this same 
age. " David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and 



* In every solar year there is an excess of ten days and twenty-one 
hours, or nearly eleven days, oyer the lunar year, i.e., over the year as 
measured by twelve revolutions of the moon, so that when the sun com- 
mences his second round, the moon is between ten and eleven days behind 
hand. In three solar years, the moon has fallen back rather more than a 
month, in nineteen years it has retrograded seven months, and in 33 years, 
7 months and 7 days, it has fallen back one solar year. This period is 
therefore A soli-lunar cycle of a certain order, and seven such periods, 
or 235 solar years, is a cycle of the same kind, and at the same time a 
number of complete solar yea^s. 



SOLi-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 45* 

he reigned forty years." So the Son of David was thirty years 
old when He began his public life. 

The gospels nowhere expressly state the exact duration of 
our Lord's ministry, yet that it lasted three years and a half, is 
clearly deducible from what they do state. The gospel of 
John distinctly mentions three " feasts " of Passover in the 
course of our Lord's ministry, and implies a fourth. The 
first, at which He cleansed the temple (chap, ii.) j the second, 
when He healed the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda 
(chap, v.); the third, about the time of his feeding the mul- 
titude (chap. vi. 3) ; and the fourth, which He ate with his 
disciples before He suffered, the same night in which He 
was betrayed (chap, xviii, 28). Four Passovers of course 
include three years. There was also evidently an interval of 
some months between our Lord's baptism by John in Bethabara 
beyond Jordan, and the first of these Passovers. The events 
which had intervened were his forty days' fast, and subsequent 
temptation in the desert of Judea • his return journey to 
Galilee ; his visit to Cana at the time of the marriage, when 
He turned the water into wine ; his subsequent brief visit to 
Capernaum ; and his return to Judea. All this can scarcely 
have occupied less than six months ; so that it is with good 
ground that, from the early Fathers onwards, our Lord's minis- 
try is assumed to have lasted three years and a half.* 



* " On the -phrase feast of the Jews (eoprr] tQiv 'lovdalwv), John v. I, turns 
mainly the question as to the duration of our Lord's public ministry. John 
notes distinctly three Passovers ; John ii. J3 ; vi. 4 ; xii. I. If now this 
feast be another Passover, then our Lord's public labours continued during 
three and a half years ; if not, then the time of his ministry must in ail 
probability be reckoned one year less. 

, The only reasonable ground of doubt in this case, is the absence of the 
definite article before feast. But even as the text now stands, it may as- 
suredly in itself just as well denote the great Jewish festival as any other. 
The following considerations seem to show that it does most probably 
thus stand for a Passover, viz. the second in our Lord's public ministry. 

1. The word feast (ecpr-fj), without the article, is put definitely for the 
Passover, in the phrase nrard eopr-qv, Matt, xxvii. 15 ; Mark xv. 6 ; Luke 
xxiii. 17. Comp. John xviii. 39. 

2. In Hebrew a noun before a genitive is made definite by prefixing tlie 



452 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

We assume then, that at the time of his death, our blessed 
Lord was thirty-three and a half years of age. Now, the soli- 
lunar cycle of which we speak is thirty-three years, seven 



article, not to the noun itself but to the genitive ; see Davies's translation 
of Gesenius's Heb. Gr. § 109 ; I Nordheim Heb. Gr. ii. p. 14, 7. This 
idiom is transferred by the LXX. into Greek ; e.g. Deut. xvi. 13, iopTTjv tuv 
(tkijvQiv T0L7]<reis aeavTw, Heb. fil'SDH JH i.e. the festival of tabernacles. 
So too in the New Testament ; Matt. xii. 24, iv np BeeXfe/3oi)X apxovn 
tQv ddL/uLovLuv, i.e. the prince of demons. Hence, in the passage before us, 
according to the analogous English idiom, we may render the phrase by 
the Jews' festival ; which marks it definitely as the Passover. 

3. It is not probable, that John means here to imply that the festival 
was indefinite or uncertain. Such is not his usual manner. The Jewish 
festivals were to him the measures of time ; and in every other instance 
they are definitely specified. So the Passover,Johnii. 23 ; xii. 1 ; even when 
Jesus does not visit it, vi. 4; and also when it is expressed only by the feast, 
iv. 45; xi. 56; xii. 12, 20, al. So too the festival of Tabernacles, vii. 2; 
and of the Dedication, x. 22. This is all natural in him ; for an indefinite 
festival could afford no note of time. 

4. The plucking of the ears of grain by the disciples shows that a 
passover had just been kept ; which tallies accurately with this visit of our 
Lord to Jerusalem. 

5. This feast could not have been the festival either of Pentecost or of 
Tabernacles next following our Lord's first Passover. He returned from 
Judea to Galilee not until eight months after that Passover, when both 
these festivals were already past. That it might by possibility have been 
the Pentecost after a second Passover not mentioned, and before that in 
John vi. 4, cannot perhaps be fully disproved ; but such a view has in 
itself no probability, and is apparently entertained by no one. At any rate, 
it would also give the same duration of three and a half years to our Lord's 
ministry. 

6. Nor can we well understand here the festival of Purim, which oc- 
curred on the fourteenth and fifteenth of the month Adar, or March, one 
month before the Passover; see Esth. ix. 21, 22, 26-28. Against this the 
following considerations present themselves : (a) The Jews did not go up 
to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival of Purim. The observance of it 
among that people throughout the world consisted solely in reading the 
Book of Esther in their synagogues on those days, and making them 
" days of feasting and joy and of sending portions (dishes) one to another 
and gifts to the poor;" Esth. ix. 22; Jos. Ant. xi. 6, 13, Reland, Antiq. ; 
Heb. iv. 9. But the " multitude," John v. 13, seems to imply a concourse 
of strangers at one of the great festivals, (b) It is very improbable that 
Jesus would have gone up to Jerusalem at the Purim, to which the Jews 
clid not go up, rather than at the Passover which occurred only a month 
later. His being once present at the festival of Dedication (John x. 22) is 
not a parallel case ; since He appears not to have gone up for that purpose, 
but this festival occurred while He remained in or near Jerusalem after the 
festival of Tabernacles, John vii. 2, sq. (c) The infirm man was healed on 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 453 

>. — . — 

months and seven days, so at first sight it seems more than 
a month longer than the life of Christ, but it must be remem- 
bered that our Lord's connection with this earth did not 



the sabbath, John v. 9 : which sabbath belonged to the festival, as tha 
whole context shows, John v. 1, 2, 10-13. But the Purim was never 
celebrated on a sabbath ; and, when it happened to fall on that day, was 
regularly deferred ; see Reland 1. c. 

7. The main objection urged against taking this feast as a Passover, is 
the circumstance, that in such case, as our Lord did not go up to the 
Passover spoken of in John vi. 4, but only at the subsequent festival of 
Tabernacles in John vii. 2, sq., He would thus have absented Himself from 
Jerusalem for a year and six months ; a neglect, it is alleged, inconsistent 
with his character and with a due observance of the Jewish law. But a 
sufficient reason is assigned for this omissisn, namely, " because the Jews 
sought to kill Him " (John vii. I ; comp. v. 18). It obviously had been our 
Lord's custom to visit the holy city every year at the Passover ; and be- 
cause, for the reason assigned, He once let this occasion pass by, He there- 
fore went up six months afterwards, at the feast of Tabernacles. All this 
presents a view perfectly natural ; and covers the whole ground. Nor 
have we any right to assume, as many do, that our Lord regularly went up to 
Jerusalem on other occasions besides those specified in the New Testament. 

In this instance, the most ancient view is that which takes feast for a 
Passover. So Irenaeus in the third century : " Et posthac iterum secunda 
vice adscendit [Jesus] in diem paschse in Hierusalem, quando paralyticum, 
qui juxta natatoriam jacebat xxxviii annos curavit ; " Adv. Haer. ii. 39. 
The same view was adopted by Eusebius, Theodoret, and others ; and in 
later times has been followed by Luther, Scaliger, Grotius, Lightfoot, 
Le Clerc, Lampe, Hengstenberg, Greswell, etc. Cyril and Chrysostom 
held to a Pentecost, as also the Harmony ascribed to Tatian ; and so, in 
modern times, Erasmus, Calvin, Beza, Bengel, etc. The festival of Purim 
was first suggested by Kepler ("Eclogse Chronicee," pp. 72, 129, sq. Fran- 
cof. 161 5) ; and at the present day this is the only view, aside from the Pass- 
over, that finds advocates. Those who hold it, as Hug, Neander, Olshausen, 
Tholuck, Meyer, Wieseler (Liicke and De Wette leave the question un- 
decided), regard John vi. 4 as having reference to the second Passover 
during our Lord's ministry ; which thus becomes limited to two and a half 
years. See generally, Greswell's Dissert, viii. vol. ii., Neander's Leben 
Jesu, 3te Ausg. p. 434. Wieseler's Chronol. Synopse der Vier Evangelien, 
pp. 211-222. 

From " Harmony of the Gospels," following that in Greek, by Ed. 
Robinson, D.D., LL.D., published by the Religious Tract Society (pp. 
199-200). " That this feast was a passover, was certainly the most ancient 
opinion, and it is the opinion of the great majority of critics, being that of 
Irenseus, as early as the second century, Eusebius and Theodoret among the 
fathers ; and of Luther, Beza, Maldonat, Grotius, Lightfoot, La Clerk. 
Lampe, Hengstenberg, Greswell, Robinson, Tholuck in his 6th edition, and 
apparently in his 7th and last, Middleton, Trench, Webster and Wilki» 
son," etc. Commentary on N. Test., Rev. D. Brown, on John v. 1. 



454 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

terminate with his death and resurrection. He walked and 
talked with his disciples, He ate and drank before them ; and 
manifested Himself to them during forty days after his resur- 
rection before He left the world altogether, and "a cloud 
received Him out of their sight." These foriy days must 
therefore be included in any estimate of his earthly life, for 
not until the final parting on the mount of Olives did it cease 
to be true that God in human form was tabernacling among 
men. 

Our Lord's life, then, was composed of the 30 years prior to 
his baptism, the three years and a half of his ministry, and 
40 days after his resurrection, and as it terminated between the 
feasts of Passover and Pentecost, it must have commenced 
about the time of the feast of Tabernacles. Now from the day 
of ascension in a.d. 29, to the first day of the feast of Taber- 
nacles in the 34th preceding year, the interval (as we show in 
the Appendix) was 33 solar years 7 lunar months and 7 days, 
which is the exact measure of the soli-lunar cycle in question. 

If it be objected that while the first and last periods of our 
Lord's life were clearly 30 years and 40 days, yet that the 
central period of his ministry cannot be proved to have been 
just three years and a half, we reply that it cannot be proved 
to have been more or less than that period, and there are the 
following good grounds for believing that the general view as 
to its duration is correct. 

(1) The Divine system of times and seasons is, as we have 
seen, one of weeks. Messiah's coming and death had been 
announced in the prophecy of " 70 weeks," and that prophecy 
speaks of a division in the midst of a week. A week of years 
and a half week of years, are periods recognised and often 
employed in Scripture, and the latter is notably used in con- 
nection with the testimony of God's faithful witnesses. " Elias 
was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed 
earnestly that it might not rain ; and it rained not on the earth 
by the space of three years and six months" (James <tv. 17). 
Similarly the two sackcloth-clothed witnesses in ReW xi. pro- 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 455 

phesy during three symbolic years and a half (1260 days), and 
then during three literal years and a half (symbolised by 
" three days and a half") they lie unburied. 

The great " seven times " of the " Times of the Gentiles " is 
divided as we have seen, into two equal portions, each con- 
sisting of " time, times, and a half," or three years and a half 
(symbolic). 

Now since the first period of Christ's life (30 years) was in 
harmony with Old Testament chronological usage, and also 
the forty days closing period, it seems reasonable to suppose 
that the central, and most important section of it, occupied by 
his public ministry, should not have been an irregular interval, 
unlike any other in Scripture. In assuming it to have been the 
important definite period to which we know it closely approxi- 
mated, we only assume that it was in full harmony with sacred 
analogy, and not at variance with the law of weeks, which 
pervades the Bible. 

(2) The events which took place before the first passover 
of Christ's life, when compared with subsequent similar journey- 
ings and tarriances, seem likely to have occupied about six 
months; and as there are no counter indications, but the 
reverse^ we may safely assume that the Lord's ministry was 
three years and a half, so nearly as to justify our regarding his 
earthly life, including its 40 days post resurrection period as 
in close, if not exact agreement with the 33 years 7 months 
and 7 days cycle, and to warrant our naming this soli-lunar 
cycle, "The Messianic Cycle." 

Now the fact that this central and all important period — the 
lifetime of our Lord — was comprised in such a cycle, naturally 
suggests the use of that cycle, as a unit for the measurement of 
larger periods. Before we point out the results of regarding it 
as one day of a great year of similar cycles, it is needful briefly 
to recall two points already discussed. 

In our study of the law of completion in weeks (p. 270), we 
showed that a Divine chronologic system exists in Scripture ; 
that it is a system of weeks ; that it pervades the law and the 



456 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

prophets, and is traceable in the Gospels and Epistles ; that it 
is especially conspicuous in the Jewish ritual, and in the sym- 
bolic prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse ; and that it 
comprises weeks, or septiform periods, on a variety of scales, 
according to the day, or unit of computation, employed. 

We considered the week of days, of months, of years, of 
decades, of weeks of years, of months of years, of years of 
years, and of millenaries ; and we saw good reason to endorse, 
on new grounds, the ancient view, that in the course of the six 
first days of the week on this last scale, the mystery of God is 
destined to be finished, and that the seventh millenary of the 
world's history is to be its sabbath — the millennial reign of 
Christ on earth. 

In considering the week of months (p. 276) we showed 
further that seven lunar months comprised all the feasts of the 
Lord, and constituted the sacred portion of the Jewish year, 
and that these feasts of the Lord, the observances and chrono- 
logy of which are set forth at length, and with great exactness 
in Leviticus xxiii., form a complete calendar of divinely 

ORDAINED TYPICAL CEREMONIES, PREFIGURING THE GLORIOUS 

history of redemption. The series of feasts thus prophetic 
of the future, — for the law had "a shadow of good things to 
come," — is introduced by the great law of the sabbatic, or 
weekly rest, a law involving a main principle of all these reli- 
gious festivals ; redemption terminating in the rest of God, and 
the rest of man in and with his Divine Redeemer. " There 
remaineth a rest — a eabbatism — to the people of God." Then 
follows the setting apart of the paschal lamb, and, after a 
definite period, its redeeming death, pointing to " Christ our 
Passover sacrificed for us." 

The closely connected feast of unleavened bread, with its 
rigid exclusion of leaven in every form, the type of sin, suc- 
ceeded. It is explained by the Apostolic commentary, 
"Therefore let^us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, 
neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the 
unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." 



SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 457 

Then on the day after the sabbath following the passover, a 
first-fruit sheaf of the early harvest was waved before God, 
emblematic of the resurrection of " Christ the first fruits of 
them that slept," and pointing with no obscurity to the occur- 
rence of his resurrection on the first day of a new week. 

Fifty days {i.e. seven weeks and a day) reckoned from this 
wave-sheaf day, brought Pentecost, or the feast of weeks, with 
another wave offering, emblematic of the church. It consisted 
not of a single first-fruit sheaf, but of two loaves baked with 
leaven (typical of evil), and consequently accompanied by a 
sin offering. These loaves prefigured the Church of redeemed 
sinners in their present imperfect state, accepted by God, but 
only in and through the Beloved. 

The next feasts prescribed were the terminal group in the 
seventh month, the feast of trumpets, the great day of atone- 
ment, and the feast of tabernacles. The first seems to point 
to a universal gospel testimony and to the future awakening 
of Israel, and to. be chronologically connected with the final 
trumpets of the Apocalypse; the second foreshadows the 
national repentance of Israel, when "they shall look upon 
Him whom they have pierced, and mourn because of Him "; 
and the third, the glad concluding harvest home feast of 
tabernacles, typifies " the times of the restitution of all things," 
" of which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy pro- 
phets since the world began." 

The anti typical realities which these feasts prefigure centre 
in the incarnation. The rejection of "God manifest in the 
flesh," and dwelling among men, led to Christ, our Passover, 
being sacrificed for us. At that historical point the type and the 
antitype met, for the crucifixion, the great act of redemption, 
was accomplished on an anniversary of the Exodus Passover, 
and the resurrection itself fell on the very day of the annual 
wave sheaf, which had for ages prefigured it ; while the descent 
of the Holy Ghost, which baptized the separate disciples into 
one Church and Body of Christ, took place on the " day of 
Pentecost fully come," so that the birth of the Christian 



458 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS, 

Church, in its corporate character, synchronized with the 
observance of the ceremonies which had so long foreshadowed 
it. 

Thus three of the most momentous and sacred events in the 
whole course of history (events than which none of greater 
importance have ever taken place), the atoning death of the 
Son of God, his glorious resurrection, and the descent of the 
Holy Ghost, coincided chronologically with their prefigurative 
ceremonial observances enjoined in Leviticus xxiii. 

Thus far the prophecy of the Jewish ritual is, therefore, ful- 
filled The remaining three feasts have yet to receive their 
antitypical accomplishment, but we know from other scriptures 
that the restoration, repentance, salvation, and blessing of 
Israel which they foreshadowed, are to take place at the close 
of the " Times of the Gentiles." This is implied in our Lord's 
own expression, "Jerusalem shall be trodden _ down of the 
Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled ; " and in 
the statement of St. Paul, "blindness in part is happened to 
Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in " (Rom. 
xi. 25). 

Now, the event which terminates the "Times of the Gentiles" 
is the coming of Christ and the establishment of his millennial 
kingdom on earth. But this event does not terminate redemp- 
tion history. It is only at the close of his millennial reign, 
when the Son shall have put down all rule and all authority 
and power, subdued all things to Himself, and destroyed the 
last enemy, death; and delivered up the kingdom to God, 
even the Father, it is only then, that his peculiar work as 
Redeemer and Mediator is accomplished. 

Redeeming work, therefore, extends, according to Scripture, 
from the days of Eden to the end of the millennium. Thence- 
forward the perfect results of the great work remain, but the 
work itself is accomplished and over. Satan and death and 
Hades are cast into the lake of fire. There is no more death, 
neither sorrow, nor crying. The former things are passed 
away, and the tabernacle of God is for ever with men. 






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SOLI-LUNAR CYCLES, AND CHRONOLOGY. 459 



We have then two leading facts ; first, that the type of re- 
demption embodied in the Jewish ritual extended over seven 
months of the ordinary year ; and secondly, that as far as can 
be ascertained from Scripture the actual history or course of 
redemption extends over seven millenaries. Now the re- 
markable result of the application of the soli-lunar cycle 
or * 33 years 7 months and 7 days to these periods is, that 
it brings the week of millenaries into close and special har- 
mony with the week of months. A thousand years contains 
as many of these soli-lunar cycles as there are days in a month, 
and consequently seven millenaries are seven months of such 
cycles. The agreement between the chronological type and the 
great antitype is not, therefore, merely that between a week 
of months and a week of millenaries, it is far more close and 
remarkable. The type bears to the antitype the per- 
fect PROPORTION OF A WEEK OF MONTHS ON ONE SCALE TO 

a week of months on another. Either may be regarded 
as a week of months contained in a year ; the former a year 
of 360 to 365 days, the latter a year of 360 to 365 soli-lunar 
cycles. 

In the adjoined plate the millenaries measuring the course 
of human history are divided into Messianic cycles, and may 
be compared with the months and days of the Levitical 
calendar sketched in the centre. 

A thousand years equal 29 J Messianic cycles (analogous with 
the 29! d. lunar month) ; thirty Messianic cycles (analogous with 
the 3od. calendar month of the Prophetic Times) equal exactly 
1007 solar years and 7 lunations ; and 180 Messianic cycles 
(half 360) equal 6045 solar years, 5 months. 

According to the Hebrew chronology, as shown by Mr. 
Clinton, we have now about reached the termination of the 
first six thousand years of human history ; and history as well as 
prophecy abundantly confirm the view this fact suggests, that 
we are now living in the last or closing days of the third great 
dispensation, and on the verge of another and a better age. 
Half a vast year of Messianic cycles, measured from the creation 



460 DIVINE SYSTEM OF TIMES AND SEASONS. 

of man, is now expiring; and as it expires, there dawns upon the 
world the light which immediately precedes the sun-rising; 
there arise around us the solemn yet joyful evidences of the 
nearness of the glorious kingdom of our God.* 



* For further particulars with reference to the Messianic cycle see Ap« 
pendir. 



CHAPTER VI. 

CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

WE have in the foregoing pages, traversed a considerable 
range of subjects ; we have endeavoured to elucidate 
the fundamental principles of progressive revelation and 
progressive interpretation, and we have under their guidance 
traced the historic fulfilment of two of the main symbolic 
prophecies of Scripture. In this fourth part of the work we 
have directed attention to a variety of facts, in the realms of 
physiology and astronomy, and shown their connection with 
another series of facts, the facts of Biblical chronology. We 
have traced, very imperfectly, but still sufficiently to demon- 
strate its existence, a system of times and seasons running 
through nature — organic and inorganic, — and through Scripture 
— historic and prophetic : — a system which consequently we 
have ventured to call, a Divine system of times and seasons. 
We have shown that this system is characterized by soli-lunar 
dominion causal and chronological, and by a marked and 
peculiar septiformity ; that a law of completion in weeks can 
be traced alike in Scripture, in physiology (normal and abnor- 
mal), in history, and in astronomy. 

We have endeavoured to avoid mere hypothesis, and to build 
on the basis of solid unquestionable facts. It remains in con- 
clusion to show the bearing of the facts of this Divine system 
of times and seasons, — 

I. On some of the 1 main controverted points of prophetic 
interpretation dealt with in the earlier part of this volume ; 

II. On the evidence of the inspiration of Scripture ; and, 

III. On the profoundly interesting question of the chrono- 
logical point now reached in human history, and the nearness 
of " the end of the age." 



462 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



I. The Divine system of times and seasons, which we have 
traced, strongly discredits the futurist system of interpreting the 
symbolic prophecies of Daniel and St. John, and in the fullest 
and most remarkable manner confirms the Protestant historic 
system. We have shown that if the true meaning of the 
chronologic statements connected with these prophecies can be 
determined, it would of itself and without the aid of further 
argument, settle the question at issue between these two schools 
of interpreters ; inasmuch as the nature of the predicted 
Antichrist is decided by the duration of his existence. If 
the 1260 days of his dominion be (unlike all the other features 
of the prediction) literal, then the futurists are right in looking 
for a future division of .the Roman earth into ten kingdoms 
with a coincident future rise of an individual Antichrist, whose 
advent shall precede by three and a half years that of Christ ; 
and in denying that these prophecies have already received 
their fulfilment. But if the 1260 days be (like the predictions 
in which the period occurs), symbolic, then the little horn and 
the ten horns, having a dwation 0/1260 years attached to them, 
and their rise immediately succeeding the break-up of the 
undivided Roman Empire, the fulfilment must be looked ioiin 
the past ; and can only be found in the history of the Papacy, 
and its relations to the kingdoms of Christendom, and to the 
true Church of Christ, during the last twelve centuries. In 
consequence of this, its great importance, we dwelt at some 
length on the evidence in favour of the year-day system of 
interpretation, and we must now direct special attention to the 
confirmation of its truth afforded by the Divine plan of times 
and seasons, which we have been investigating. 

The period which, — as marking the duration, and therefore 
the nature of the great Antichristian Apostasy, — is the disputed 
period, is seven times designated by expressions synonymous 
with half 'a week of years: "forty and two months," 1260 days, etc. 
Now this alone would prove nothing, because weeks on an 
almost infinite variety of scale, are found, as we have shown, in 
the word and works of God. But this half week leads up to a 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 463 

certain terminal point, the establishment of the kingdom of the 
God of heaven, the overthrow of Antichrist and his armies, the 
cessation of the treading down of the holy city. These same 
events mark the termination of one of the weeks we have con- 
sidered, the last of the three great dispensational weeks, the 
times of the Gentiles ; this also ends in the establishment of the 
kingdom of God, the overthrow of Babylon and the beast, and 
the Second Advent of Christ. That is, we find a whole week 
of "seven times," or 2520 years, leading up to that; and we 
find also a half-week of " time, times and a half," leading up 
to that. How can we question that the latter is half of the 
former ? that the half-week of years, is symbolic of a half-week 
of prophetic times, or years of years? that the predicted 1260 
"days" represent the 1260 years which are the last half of the 
Gentile dispensation ? 

If this be so, if this period be the solemnly momentous and 
important last half of the last great dispensation, the twelve 
centuries which have rolled over Christendom since the rise of 
the Papacy, including the dark ages, the Reformation, and the 
modern revival of primitive Christian doctrine, and spread of 
missionary enterprise, with the coincident rise and spread of 
infidelity, then it is easy to understand the prominence assigned 
to it in the prophetic word. But if it be literally half a week 
of years, it is a brief half without a corresponding half, and no 
reason consistent with the wisdom and goodness of God can 
, be assigned for the great importance which is attached to it in 
Scripture. 

And when, further, turning to the scroll of history, 

WE SEE THAT THE GREAT WEEK OF THE TIMES OF THE GEN 
TILES WAS, AS A MATTER OF FACT, BISECTED BY THE RISE OP 

an Antichristian power, accurately fulfilling the conditions 
of the prophecy, and whose political existence demonstrably 
did endure 1260 years, or half a week on the year-day scale, 
it seems almost impossible to resist the conviction that this 
is the scale employed, and this the Power foretold. 
It is a further argument in favour of the year-day system, that 



464 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

the periods of symbolic prophecy, interpreted in accordance 
with it, form parts of a great septenary system ; the previous 
links in the chain being found in other portions of Scripture, 
and the subsequent ones in the movements of the universe. In 
the law, in the prophets, and in the Psalms, we found the week 
of days, the week of weeks, the week of months, the week of 
years, the week of weeks of years, the week of decades, and 
the week of w r eeks of decades. Now the dispensation^ " seven 
times," and its half, the 1260 years, are a week and a half-week 
of prophetic times, or years of 'years, the next step in advance ; 
and they are followed by the week of millenaries, and by the 
higher and vaster weeks marked out by the revolutions of the 
solar system. But for the clue afforded by the prophetic times 
interpreted according to the year-day system, the true measures 
of the dispensational divisions of history, would probably never 
have been surmised. Is it likely that a key which has un- 
locked so much, should be a wrong key, that the period which 
has proved a clue to the entire labyrinth, should itself have 
been misapprehended ? 

But further, the fact that these periods of Daniel, 

INTERPRETED ON THE YEAR-DAY SCALE, ARE FOUND TO BE 
NATURAL ASTRONOMIC CYCLES OF SINGULAR ACCURACY AND 
BEAUTY, UNKNOWN TO MANKIND UNTIL DISCOVERED BY MEANS 
OF THESE VERY PROPHECIES, SEEMS ALONE TO SETTLE THE 
QUESTION THAT THIS IS THE TRUE SCALE. Is it not most 

natural and suitable, that great events, deemed worthy of pre- 
diction by the Spirit of God ages before they occurred, should 
have had their fore-ordained duration marked off by the occult 
movements and coincidences of those orbs, which together 
constitute God's glorious chronometer? Taken literally, the 
periods of symbolic prophecy, are astronomically nothing. In- 
terpreted on the year-day principle, they are natural cycles, as 
distinctly marked out as such, as our ordinary months or years. 
Would this be so, were the brief symbolic period, everything, 
and the antitypical, the year-day period, nothing ? Taken liter- 
ally, 2300 days are astronomically nothing j while 2300 years 
form precisely the largest secular soli-lunar cycle known. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 465 

When these dispensational, chronologic, and astronomic 
harmonies, are allowed their due weight in determining the 
true scale of prophetic chronology, only one conclusion seems 
possible. The system employed is that of denoting a year by 
a day ; not brief, but long periods, are therefore predicted, not 
passing events occupying only a few years, but stupendous 
ones, enduring through centuries, and affecting many genera- 
tions of men. And these events are not to be looked for in 
the future, they are already for the most part fulfilled. This 
conclusion overthrows the entire futurist system, and fixes the 
application of the main symbolic prophecies of Daniel and the 
Apocalypse to the past and present, rather than exclusively to 
the future. 

We invite futurist expositors of the prophetic word, to con- 
sider all the arguments on this subject which we have adduced, 
and either to refute them, or to acknowledge their force. Pro- 
phetic discussion and controversy are often feared and depre- 
cated, because they have in other days degenerated into strife, 
and occasioned separation among brethren. These, however, 
are happily, not necessary results of searching the Scripture on 
this or any other topic, and they are evils from which humility 
and a real desire to discover the truth of God, will effectually 
preserve sincere inquirers and students. 

We are strongly of opinion that the questions at issue between 
presentist and futurist interpreters of prophecy, should be both 
patiently studied, and fully discussed, both from the platform 
and by the press, with a view to their removal. 

One system or other must be erroneous ; surely it is not hope- 
less to discover which ! No generation of Christians could 
ever have attempted the task with such a prospect of success as 
our own ; not only is there a special promise to the wise in the 
time of the end, that they shall understand these things, but the 
very nature of the case makes it'clear, that if the historic system 
be the true one, we are in a better position to prove it, than our 
predecessors could be, for every fresh fulfilment that can be 
indicated, strengthens the proof. That most notable event the 

II H 



466 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

downfall of the Temporal Power of the Papacy exactly 1260 
years after the edict of Phocas, ought to provoke a calm and 
thorough re-examination of the subject, on the part of our 
futurist friends. 

" The days are at hand," and the effect of every vision, and 
the testimony of the Church on this great subject should be as 
clear and as tnianimous as possible, for if the trumpet give an 
uncertain sound, who shall prepare for the battle ? The world 
will never give heed to the warnings of the prophetic word, 
while the ministers of that word differ diametrically among 
themselves as to its true meaning ; nor will Christians be 
roused to any such deep and real conviction of the nearness of 
the end as will produce practical results, by the exposition of 
varying and inconsistent views. At this eleventh hour, if ever, 
the predictions of the word of Cod ought to be clear to wise 
and humble students, nor should such rest content without an 
honest endeavour to compare and resolve their differences. 
We humbly hope that our own discoveries as to the epact 
measures of the prophetic times, may be helpful in the con- 
sideration of the question ; and that, the year-day system of 
interpreting the chronologic statements of symbolic prophecy, — 
that main pillar of the Protestant historic view, may, in the 
light of the confirmatory evidence of its truth afforded by this 
investigation of the Divine system of times and seasons, be 
generally received among students of prophecy, as a truth 
which has been demonstrated. 

II. The facts we have adduced have also an important bear- 
ing on the fundamental question of the inspiration of Scripture, 
and thus indirectly on the subject of Christian evidences. We 
have shown that nature is characterized by a septiform perio- 
dicity, and that many of its revolutions are regulated by a 
law of weeks ; also that Scripture, in a great variety of ways, 
embodies the same septiform system. Now it must be borne 
in mind that the existence of this system in nature, has only 
been recognised of late years. Modem science,— with its careful 
and all-embracing scrutiny of investigation into natural phe- 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 467 

nomena, with its reverential attention to even the minutest 
details of physical function, with its rich accumulations of 
tabulated records of observed facts, and its unprejudiced 
candour in submitting all its theories to the test cf experiment, 
— has come to perceive, and for the first time, a law of septi- 
form periodicity in nature. Mankind in all ages must of 
course have been practically familiar with certain obvious 
and universal instances of its prevalence 3 but the wide extent 
of its operation, its exactness, and the variety of the spheres 
in which it may be traced, is matter of very recent discovery. 
The papers contributed by Dr. Laycock to the Lancet, which 
we have quoted, were written less than forty years ago ; and 
even now the subject is imperfectly understood. 

It is thus abundantly evident that the writers of Scripture, 
in attributing to their Mosaic legislation, embodying in their 
historical narratives, and in concealing in their symbolic pro- 
phecies, this same septiform system, or law of completion in 
weeks, were not adopting a principle already acknowledged in 
'the world at large, or even known to the men of science of 
their clay. They were entirely ignorant of the recently dis- 
covered septiformity of nature, and the exact harmony of their 
writings with this widely operative, but to them utterly unknown 
principle, must, on their part, have been perfectly undesigned. 

On the other hand, it is equally impossible that this harmony 
should be the result of chance : the use of the system in 
Scripture is too thorough and all-pervading to admit of such 
an explanation. It does not consist in a few minor arrange- 
ments enacted by a single legislator ; it is the consistent and 
complex system underlying the law and ritual, which, for 
three thousand five hundred years have been obeyed by an 
entire nation ; a system running unperceived through the 
historical records of the Old Testament, and lying hidden 
under mystic expressions, in its symbolic prophecies — pro- 
phecies understood at the time neither by those who gave, nor 
by those who received them, and whose true scale has only 
become apparent in these latter days, in the light of their own 



468 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

fulfilment. Creation, history, and Mosaic law, agree with the 
predictions of the prophets and apostles, and with the words of 
our Lord Himself, in recognising this system. It pervades 
Old and New Testaments, and harmonizes Jewish and Chris- 
tian predictions. The actual events of redemption history, are 
found to be in chronological harmony with the octave or New 
Creation and Jubilee reckoning of the Law ; the chronology of 
the types of Leviticus is the chronology of Christianity antici- 
pated. Intentionally then, and of set purpose, and in the most 
consistent way, the septiform law so prevalent and controlling 
in nature, is employed by the writers of Scripture, though they 
cannot have derived it from nature. Whence theft did they 
derive it ? How came they thus to employ it ? There is only- 
one reply ! Holy men of old spake as they were moved by 
the Holy Ghost. 

Further ; we have seen that the septiform divisions of time 
in the Old Testament, run on constantly to an octave, and 
give a glad and glorious prominence to the eighth day and the 
fiftieth day, in connection with observances intimating that a 
new and better economy was destined to succeed the Jewish ; 
that in a New Creation, to follow the old, and in that alone, 
would full purity and peace, perfect joy and liberty be found. 
Would Jewish legislators and prophets have invented or con- 
ceived such an idea as this ? Would they, of their own accord, 
have embodied in their law, in their history, in their prophecies, 
a silent testimony that Judaism was destined to be succeeded 
and set aside by a better order of things ? Would they who 
held themselves to be the sole and peculiar people of God, 
have incorporated in their sacred books, a chronologic system, 
which points with no obscurity to the passing away of Judaism ? 
No ! Such a system cannot have originated in the Jewish 
mind, and yet the books are, as regards their human source, 
unquestionably Jewish. The fact can be explained only by 
admitting, that these Jewish minds were inspired, and these 
Jewish pens guided, by Him who from the beginning foresaw 
and planned the end, who intended Christianity to succeed 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 469 

Judaism, the heavenly to follow the earthly, the substance to 
replace the shadow. 

It may be urged, that though the law of septiform periodicity 
in vital function was unperceived by the ancients, that yet 
conspicuous celestial phenomena, such as the lunar quarters, 
may account for the Bible use of the week, without supposing 
inspiration. But the plea has no force, for the lunar quarter is 
not so near seven days as to make the observance of the week 
compulsory or inevitable, and as a matter of fact, it is not 
observed by two-thirds of mankind. China and, till quite 
recently, Japan, and all heathen nations, do not recognise the 
septiform division of time. Unlike the day, the month, and 
the year in this respect, the week is not marked out by an 
obvious and complete celestial revolution. Its observance 
evidently springs from a higher source, even the direct primi- 
tive mandate of the Most High : it has been imposed on man 
from Eden onwards (as well as indelibly impressed on his 
physical constitution), by the Creator Himself directly, and 
not indirectly, as the day, month, and year. 

Again, what but inspiration of God can account for the fact 
that the prophetic periods of Daniel and St. John are found to 
be accurate soli-lunar cycles ? and that their very epacts form 
a septiform series of periods as we have shown ? Was Daniel 
acquainted with these facts ? Could John have adapted his 
writings to the discoveries of modern science ? Impossible ! 
Candour must acknowledge that in the existence of such a 
system of times and seasons as we have traced, in the Bible, 
there is a proof of the Divine inspiration of the authors of that 
volume. Man never originated its holy and harmonious laws, 
with their wonderful septenary system of typical times and 
seasons, fulfilled, and still fulfilling, in the sacred events of 
Redemption Story. Man could not have invented its equally 
wonderful prophecies, unfolding as they do the whole plan and 
course of history, alike in its grand outline, and in its minor 
detail, and including even, in many cases, the accurate chron- 
ology of the things foretold. Man can never have been the 



47o CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

author of a system of times and seasons which involves the 
co-ordination of things celestial and terrestrial ; the mutual 
adaptation of the periodicity of vital phenomena, the sacred 
seasons of legal type, the periods of prophecy and the chron- 
ology of history, with the periods of the revolutions and cycles 
of sun and moon and planet, or those of the movements of the 
whole solar system. Man can neither foretell the future nor 
control it ; man cannot order on a definite plan, the course of 
ages, or so direct the revolutions of the moral world, as that 
they shall harmonize with those of the material universe. Such 
operations can be accomplished only by Omnipotence, such 
acts can be attributed to God alone. The sacred volume, — 
that unfolds the Divine world-system, including the course and 
chronology of the ages of history, of ages future at the time 
when it was written, as well as of ages past ; foretelling periods 
since fulfilled, and found, 2000 years after their prediction, to 
be celestial cycles, — must be from God, and he who refuses to 
acknowledge this, is bound to find some other satisfactory ex- 
planation of facts which true science cannot deny, nor common 
honesty ignore. And this evidence may be adduced in favour 
of each portion of the sacred volume ; the Pentateuch and the 
prophets, the historical books of the Old Testament and the 
gospels of the New, the Psalms and the Epistles and the 
Apocalypse, all are more or less pervaded by the same system 
of times and seasons. A Divine unity pervades the volume in 
this as in other respects, and the chronology of the Bible, in- 
dependently of any other line of evidence, proves it to be the 
word of God. 

III. And finally, the Divine system of times and seasons, 
which we have been investigating, has an evident bearing on 
the deeply important and profoundly interesting subject of the 
nearness of the end of the age, — of the close of these Times of 
the Gentiles, and the simultaneous inauguration of the " Times 
of restitution of all things, of which God hath spoken by the 
mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began." 

It bears on this question mainly by the evidence it affords 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. Ml 

of the existence of a definite and predetermined chronological 
system, in the providential dealings of God with man; in the 
proof it gives that this system is a system of weeks, and that the 
great week of this third or Gentile dispensation, has almost 
run its course. Further, by confirming as we have, seen that it 
does, in the fullest way, the year-day system of interpreting the 
chronology of symbolic prophecy, it brings the celebrated half- 
week of the great Antichristian apostasy into perfect harmony 
with all the other weeks of Scripture and of nature, determin- 
ing its character thus by its duration, and leaving no doubt as 
to the power intended. The fulfilments which this system 
enables us to trace in the past, are so many guides as to the 
future, so that by its help chronologic prophecy, instead of 
being a puzzling mystery, is felt to become emphatically a 
light shining in a dark place, — a light which throws its beams 
back over the complex mazes of history, and forwards over the 
transcendently interesting events of the rapidly approaching 
crisis, which is to usher in the sabbath of humanity. 

We must therefore briefly review the evidence of the nearness 
of the end of the age which is afforded by chronologic prophecy, 
and confirmed by non-chronologic predictions, and we must 
show, that while there is irresistible evidence to prove that the 
end is near, there are positively no data to enable us to fix on 
any exact year, as the probably predestined time of the con- 
summation. According to the testimony of the sure word of 
prophecy, the end is near, but none can say how near, or 
determine its actual epoch. 

First, then, in proof that it is near, let the measures of the 
three dispensations be remembered, and the wide and almost 
universal range of the law of completion in weeks. " Seven 
times " and seven times only axe appointed as the period of 
Jewish degradation and dispersion. He who predicted the 
four hundred years affliction of the seed of Abraham at the 
beginning of their history, and who when those four hundred 
years were fulfilled, delivered Israel from Egypt, and judged 
the nation which had held them in bondage, predicted later 



47 2 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

on, that for a great week of 2520 years, Gentiles should rule 
over and afflict the Jewish people, and that at the end of that 
time Gentile monarchy should be destroyed, and the kingdom 
restored again to Israel, in the person of their Messiah. Inde- 
pendent Jewish monarchy fell as we know in the Babylonish 
captivity, since which event the tribes of Israel have existed 
only in bondage or dispersion. In about forty-five years from 
the present time (1879 A - D -) tne great week of the Times of 
the Gentiles will have run out, even measured from its latest 
possible commencing date, the final conquest of Jehoiachin 
by Nebuchadnezzar, B.C. 598. The great image of Gentile 
monarchy has but a few years longer to exist ; the period of 
Gentile supremacy is all but ended; the great but hidden 
dispensational prophecy of the " seven times " clearly teaches 
that we are near the end of the age. 

And secondly, let the measures of the Antichristian apos- 
tasy, which is predicted under seven different aspects, be 
remembered. Half a week is assigned as its duration, half 
this great dispensational week of seven times — 1260 years. 
Like all the other periods we have considered, this half-week 
may be dated, as we have seen, from a variety of starting-points ;* 
either from the decree of the Emperor Justinian constituting 
the bishop of Rome head of all the Churches, and so deliver- 
ing the saints into his hands, (a.d. 533), — when it ends in the 
French Revolution, a.d. 1793; or from the decree of the 
Emperor Phocas, conceding to Boniface the Third, not only the 
primacy of the Church of Rome and all the Western Churches, 
but that of Constantinople and all the Eastern Churches 
(a.d. 606), which makes it run out at the recent complete 
destruction of the Papal temporal power and dominion (1866- 
70) ; or the period may be dated from the year a.d. 663, when 
Vitalian, the bishop of Rome, enjoined the services of the 

* This is the case even with the comparatively brief period of the Baby- 
lonish captivity, whose seventy years may be dated either from Nebuchad- 
nezzar's first invasion, B.C. 606, to the edict of Cyrus, B.C. 536, or from 
the destruction of the temple, B.C. 587, to the temple restoration, B.C. 517. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 473 

Church to be read in Latin throughout all Christendom,— 
when the half-week would (like the whole week) expire, in a.d. 
1923. We have seen the two first measures of this period 
expire, and we have seen the events predicted take place. 
The prophecy implies a brief succeeding period before the 
close, " they shall take away his kingdom, to consume and to 
destroy it to the end : and the kingdom and dominion, and 
the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be 
given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose 
kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall 
serve and obey Him." We have seen the kingdom taken 
away ; we wait to see the full consumption and destruction, 
and the establishment of the kingdom of the Most High. The 
prophecy of the " time, times and a half," by its fulfilment, 
proves, that we are close upon the end of the age. 

And thirdly, the prediction relative to the cleansing of the 
sanctuary does the same. The Holy Land, the Holy City, 
and the site of the Temple or Sanctuary of God at Jerusalem, 
are to be finally " cleansed " 2300 years from some starting 
point which is not exactly defined, but which appears from the 
prophecy to be closely connected with the restoration of Judah 
from Babylon ; that is, Jerusalem is, after that period, to cease 
to be trodden down of the Gentiles, the times of the Gentiles 
having been fulfilled. Dated from the earliest possible starting 
point, the commission given by Artaxerxes to Ezra, B.C. 457, 
this period expired as we have seen in 1844, which was a 
marked epoch in the fall of that Mohammedan power which 
has long defiled the sanctuary and trodden down Jerusalem. 
But dated 145 years later, from the era of the Seleucidse, this 
period measured in lunar years expires, seventy-five years later, in 
a.d. 1 91 9. We have noted various indications in the condition 
of Palestine and of Israel, and in the political events of our 
own day which seem to indicate that the cleansing of the sanc- 
tuary and the restoration of Israel are not distant. When, these 
shall take place, when the Moslems, now driven out of Bulgaria, 
shall be driven also out of Syria, when the nations of Europe, 



474 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

actuated it may be merely by mutual distrust and. political 
jealousy, or it may be by higher motives, shall conspire to re- 
instate the Jews in the land of their forefathers, then the last 
warning bell will have rung • then the last of the unfulfilled 
predictions of Scripture as to events prior to the great crisis, 
will have received its accomplishment, then the second advent 
of Israel's rejected Messiah to reign in conjunction with his 
risen and glorified saints as King over all the earth, will be 
close at hand, then the mystery of God will be all but finished, 
and the manifestation of Christ immediate.* How long a time* 
may be required to bring about this restoration of Israel — who 
shall say? Never within the last 1800 years has it seemed so 
likely as now, for never, since it first arose, has Moslem power 
lain so low as it does at the present moment. The destruc- 
tion OF THE POWER AND INDEPENDENCE OF THE OTTOMAN 

Empire, like the annihilation of the temporal dominion 
of the Papacy, should be as a trumpet-blast to Chris- 
tendom, proclaiming that the day of Christ is at hand. 

The sanctuary cycle of 2300 years, equally with the two pre- 
vious prophecies, indicates that the end is near. 

Though differing as to many minor details, students of chro- 
nological prophecy with one consent agree in this conclusion. 
which is in itself a strong argument that it rests on a solid 
basis of revealed truth. The fact that many premature antici- 
pations of the end, have by the event been proved mis- 
taken, is sometimes adduced as a proof that all expectations 
based on chronologic prophecy, are of the nature of vain and 
foolish speculations, deserving only of ridicule and contempt 
from sober-minded practical Christian people. But when 
viewed in the light of the revealed purpose of God, to make 
known the future only by degrees, and only as the Church was 
able to bear it, the fact alluded to, is merely a proof that the 
symbolic language in which these chronological predictions 

* We say emphatically "manifestation," because Scripture does not 
seem absolutely to exclude the possibility that the rapture of the Church 
(1 Thess. iv.) may have taken place before. 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 475 

were expressed, has answered its divinely intended purpose, 
and disguised, till nearly the time of its accomplishment, the 
tine meaning of the prophecy. To the early generations of 
the Church it was not given to understand these chronologic 
prophecies at all ; later generations made a good guess at their 
general drift and scale ; the Reformers obtained approximately 
true ideas of their scope and application \ to many of the 
prophetic expositors and commentators of the last two centuries 
very clear light was granted, and (in spite of the obscurity which 
rash futurist speculations have cast over the subject) it may 
safely be said that in our own day the light has become so 
strong, clear, and bright, that the historic and doctrinal portions 
of Scripture are scarcely more simple and comprehensible than 
are its main prophetic outlines, to those who carefully study 
them. 

And further, though foolish speculators have brought ridicule 
on the study of prophecy, by carnal, presumptuous, and baseless 
attempts to fix the day and the hour of the Second Advent, and 
though even cautious and learned students have often erred in 
their anticipations, yet it must in all fairness be granted on the 
other hand, that no sooner was the historic system of interpret- 
ing the Apocalypse received, and the true scale of enlarging the 
miniature periods of symbolic prophecy adopted, than some 
remarkably correct anticipations of future events were made 
and published. Since then, expositors of chronologic prophecy 
have proved over and over again, that they are on the right 
track, even though they may have erred in the application of 
certain principles, or in selection of certain data, on which to 
base their calculations. And it is evident that even when they 
had rightly accepted the year-day system, and when they had 
correctly apprehended the meaning of the symbols employed, 
and duly applied them to the events intended, they were by no 
means secure from minor errors. The very fact that all the 
prophetic periods have double, and some of them triple and 
even fourfold eras of commencement and conclusion, — coin- 
cident with definite stages of development and decay in tha 



476 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

Powers symbolised, leaves room for such errors, and accounts for 
them, without detracting from the value of the system employed. 
And if such false anticipations are noted, correct ones should 
in all fairness be remembered also. One of the earliest and 
most remarkable of these is that of Robert Fleming, who in 
his work on the " Rise and Fall of Rome Papal," published 
in the year 1701 (a hundred and seventy-eight years ago), anti- 
cipated the years 1794 and 1848, as critical years in the down- 
fall of the papacy ; he added " yet we are not to imagine that 
these events will totally destroy the papacy, although they will 
exceedingly weaken it, for we find that it is still in being and 
alive, when the next vial is poured out." Is it not a proof that 
this expositor was working on right lines, and had seized the 
true clue, that he should thus have fixed nearly a century before- 
hand, on the close of the 18th century, as the commencement 
of the era of Divine vengeance on the Papal power, and have 
pointed out within a single year, the very central period of that 
signal judgment ? The year 1793 was that of the Reign of 
Terror, and of the temporary suspension of the public profession 
of Christianity in France, the first of Papal kingdoms ; and 
five years later the Papal government in Italy was overthrown, 
and the Pope carried captive to Sienna. There was not a sign 
in the political heavens when Fleming wrote, that such events 
were impending ; he foresaw them solely in the light of chron- 
ologic prophecy, and had he weighed a little more maturely 
the relative importance of the various Pope-exalting decrees 
and acts, which form the starting-points of the prophetic 1260 
years, he would have fixed on that of Phocas, as the most im- 
portant, and have added to the above two accurate and correct 
anticipations, a third, that the years 1866-70, would be years 
of even more decided crisis in the history of the Papal apostasy, 
and would probably witness the entire and final overthrow of 
the temporal sovereignty of the Popes. A very considerable 
number of expositors agreed, in indicating long before their 
arrival, the remarkable years a.d. 1848, and a.d. 1866-70, as 
years of crisis in the downfall of despotic power in Europe, and 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 477 

of Papal usurpation ; while this half-century as the appointed 
period in which should be finished the long-continued exhaus- 
tion and decay of the Ottoman Empire, symbolised by the 
drying up of the Euphrates, has been indicated by an equally 
large number. Mr. Habershon, in his " Dissertation on the 
Prophetic Scriptures," published in 1834, pointed out that the 
year a.d. 1844 ought to be a year of crisis in this process, which, 
as we have seen it proved to be, the year in which the perse- 
cuting sword of Islam was by the power of the Christian nations 
of Europe, forced back finally into its sheath, since which 
Ottoman independence has never been a reality. 

Let those who have justified themselves in turning from any 
deep or thorough study of the prophetic word, on the plea 
that interpreters differ among themselves, and that their prog- 
nostications have often proved false, remember that this must 
have been the case with regard to each one of the chronologi- 
cal prophecies that have now passed into the realms of history. 
Though each one has, as we can see, been fulfilled with mar- 
vellous exactitude, error would have been not only possible, 
but almost inevitable, in any attempt to fix beforehand the 
exact date of the predicted event. Had Israel in Egypt, or 
Moses in Midian, endeavoured to discover beforehand the 
pi-ecise year in which the 400 years of affliction and bondage 
predicted by God to Abram as to befall his seed, would ter- 
minate, they would have been sorely puzzled to select a com- 
mencing epoch. Was it to be dated from the call of Abram, 
or from the day the promise was given ? or from the birth of 
Isaac, the promised seed ? or from the descent into Egypt ? or 
from the commencement of the cruel treatment of the children 
of Israel by the Egyptians, when there arose a king who knew 
not Joseph ? There was a wide choice of possible commenc- 
ing epochs, and it was easy to select a wrong one 1 The event 
proved that none of these was the real starting-point; that while 
the call of Abram was the terminus a quo of the main period, 
modified by an addition of thirty years (Exod. xii. 40-42 ; Gal. 
iii. 17), yet that the main period itself started from neither of 



478 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

the above-mentioned probable epochs, but from the time when 
Isaac was five years old; and to this day it is a matter of con- 
jecture what the event was which marked that year, though 
there is little doubt that it was the casting out of the bond- 
woman and her son, on the occasion of the mocking of the 
heir of promise by the natural seed. This mocking, or "perse- 
cuting" (Gal. iv. 29) is the first affliction of Abraham's seed of 
which we have any record, and its result demonstrated that it 
was in Isaac the seed was to be called. The 430 years would 
thus start from the grant of the land to Abram's seed, and the 
400 from the act showing which of the two seeds of Abram was 
to possess it. The important allegorical meaning attributed to 
this casting-out of Ishmael, confirms the impression that it was 
the starting-point ; but the fact cannot be proved, and all we 
know is that the Exodus (which took place on the self-same day 
that the 430 years ran out — Exod. xii. 40) was 405 years after 
the birth of Isaac, so that the 400 years dated from Isaac's fifth 
year. How could Israel in Egypt possibly have guessed that ? 
Their prophetic students (if they had any) would most likely 
base their calculations on the supposition, that the period 
started from the year the prediction was given, — twenty or 
twenty-two years before the true point. And when the 400 
years from that epoch expired, sceptics and objectors may 
have derided them, and they themselves may have had their 
faith in the Divine prediction and their long-cherished hope of 
deliverance sorely tried, by the fact that their expectation had 
failed ! But God is not a man, that He should lie ; neither 
the son of man, that He should repent ; hath He said, and 
shall He not do it ? When the appointed period ended, the 
promised deliverance came. Little as Pharaoh and all Egypt 
feared their degraded bondslaves, or the God they professed 
to serve ; little as either tyrant or captives foresaw any impend- 
ing crisis of judgment and deliverance, suddenly and un- 
expectedly it came. In the short space of a few weeks, or 
months, Egypt was covered with confusion and horror and 
death. The fruits of the earth were blasted and devoured by 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 479 

locusts, the waters of the Nile were turned to blood, the cattle 
were destroyed throughout the land, filthy insects and noisome 
diseases afflicted the Egyptians, vermin rilled their houses and 
their fields, thunder and lightning and fire and hail devastated 
the land of Ham, a horror of great darkness prevailed for three 
days, death raised a great cry in Egypt, and at last its proud 
monarch and all his hosts perished in the Red Sea, while Israel 
sang unto the Lord, who had triumphed gloriously, and who, 
according to his faithful word, had brought forth the people 
whom He had redeemed. 

A longer bondage is now drawing to a close, and a greater 
Exodus awaits both the natural and the spiritual seeds of Abra- 
ham ; its date is similarly fixed in the purpose of God and 
similarly defined by chronologic prophecy, and though some 
students may mistake its exact era, and be discouraged by an 
apparent failure of their hope, and though the world may exult, 
and the mockers say, Where is the promise of his coming ? yet 
the vision is for an appointed time, at the end it shall speak 
and not lie, or be found false ; therefore we will wait for it, 
" for it will surely come, it will not tarry." 

It was the same, both • with the chronological prophecy of 
the seventy years' captivity in Babylon, and with that of the four 
hundred and ninety years, from the restoration to Messiah the 
Prince ; both were clear in their main tenor, but both obscure 
as regards their exact termini. As to the "seventy weeks," 
even when its true year-day scale was understood, it was im- 
possible to fix its commencing date with any certainty, because 
there were several edicts of restoration issued by the Persian 
kings, any one of which might well have been supposed to 
mark the starting-point of the 490 years ; and there was no 
deciding whether the terminal event was to be the birth, or the 
maturity and presentation to Israel, or the death, of Messiah. 
Even now, in the light of the historic fulfilment, it is not alto- 
gether easy to affix the exact limits of these 490 years, though 
it is plain that such was the interval, because several import- 
ant termini seem to possess claims to be the intended ones. 



480 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

In short it is clear that a knowledge of the exact 
year of its termination, is not needful to an intelli- 
gent and correct apprehension of the fact, that a 

GREAT CHRONOLOGIC PROPHECY IS NEAR ITS CLOSE. Daniel 

understood by the writings of Jeremiah that the seventy years' 
captivity had nearly expired, and set himself to pray for the 
promised restoration. Those who looked for redemption in 
Israel were right in conceiving that the time for Messiah's 
appearance had come, though neither they, nor Daniel, could 
in all probability have assigned the correct chronological 
termini of the predictions on which their hopes were based. 

This is exactly the position of the students of the prophetic 
word in our day ; they know that they are living in the time of 
the end, but guided by the experience of these earlier saints, 
they see also, that the two great partially fulfilled chronological 
prophecies, that of the seven times, or 2520 years of Gentile 
dominion, and that of the 2300 years to the cleansing of the 
sanctuary, have several possible dates of rise and close. (The 
1260 years of the duration of the Papal dynasty as a political 
power, must, since the events of 1870, be placed in the category 
of fulfilled, rather than unfulfilled predictions.) On this account 
alone, as well as other grounds, the wise among them refrain 
from any attempt to assign the precise date of the consum- 
mation. These " times " appear to run out first in a.d. 1844-48 
and fully in a.d. 1919-23, but whether these are the final dates, 
and what the exact nature of the terminal event may be, it is 
impossible to ascertain and foolish to surmise.* We are in the 



* It should be noticed in this connection, that from the year 606 B.C., 
the year in which "the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah," into the 
hand of Nebuchadnezzar, "with part of the vessels of the house of God, 
which he carried into the land of Shinar" (Dan. i.), to the year a.d. 637, 
in which Jerusalem was providentially given into the hands of the Caliphs, 
there is a period of 1260 CALENDAR YEARS (1260 360-day years are 1242 
solar years; and in adding B.C. to A.D. periods, one year has to be sub- 
tracted); and that from a.d. 637 to a.d. 1879 there is a similar period 
of 1260 calendar years, or together 2520 calendar YEARS. 

As to the first of these dates, B.C. d»o6, Clinton states that the fourth year 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 481 

position of travellers, approaching a large and to them unknown 
^ity, at the end of a long railway journey. They are aware of 
the distance to be traversed, of the stations to be passed on the 
way, and of the time required for the transit. The milestones 
have long shown them that they are rapidly n earing their goal ; 
the time the journey was to occupy has elapsed, and they have 
observed that the station just passed was the last but one. 
Yet the terminus in the strange city may have several distinct 
platforms, separated from each other by short distances ; the 
train may draw up at one or two before it comes to a final stand 
at the last : they are ignorant of the exact localities in the great 
metropolis, and hardly know at which station they will be met 
by their expectant friends. Still they have no hesitation in 
making their preparations for leaving the carriage, and in con- 
gratulating each other with a glad " here we are at last ! " They 
would smile at the man who should dispute their conviction, 
though they may be unable to decide whether it will be five 
minutes or ten, or only two or three, before they actually reach 
their destination. It is a mere question of minutes and miles ; 
if one platform is not the right one, the next may be ; at any 
rate, the long journey lies behind, the desired goal is all but 



of Jehoiakim is to be reckoned from Aug., B. C. 606. The deportation 
of Daniel was in the third year of Jehoiakim (Dan. i. 1) whence we may 
place the expedition of Nebuchadnezzar towards the end of the third, and 
beginning of the fourth year, in the summer of B.C. 606. In the fourth 
year of Jehoiakim, Baruch writes the book : Jer. xxxvi. I, 2. (Fasti 
Hellenici, p. 328. ) As to the second of these dates, a.d. 637, Clinton states 
in his Fasti Romani, that "Abu Obeidah having received orders at the 
close of 636 to besiege Jerusalem, sent Yezid hither first with 5000 men. 
At last the patriarch Sophronius consented that the city should be sur- 
rendered upon condition that the inhabitants should receive the articles 
from the Caliph himself. Omar entered the city in 637. Omar 
while at Jerusalem divided Syria into two parts, and committed all between 
the Hauran and Aleppo to Abu Obeidah. Yezid took charge of all Palestine 
and the seashore " (Ockley). How grave the crisis just reached in 
1878, in the overthrow of the once mighty Ottoman empire in the east ! 
The mosque of Omar still stands on the site of the ancient temple of 
Jehovah, the temple which God of old filled with his glory. The Mo- 
hammedan is still the ruler of Palestine, but how soon we may see the 
mosque of Omar taken down, and Palestine delivered from its last oppressor ! 

I I 



482 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

reached. It is easy to be patient, and not difficult to bear a 
momentary disappointment, because the main result is certain, 
and the end in any case close at hand. 

Let it also be noted that the conviction of the nearness of 
the end derived from chronologic prophecy, and from a study 
of the Divine system of times and seasons, is abundantly con- 
firmed by a multitude of predictions, wholly destitute of the 
chronologic element, as is proved by the fact, that the futurist 
school of interpreters, who are deprived by their system of all 
the guidance afforded by chronologic prophecy, are convinced 
equally with their opponents, that these are the last days. 

Space obliges us to select only one or two " signs of the 
times" of this nature. The angel mentions to the prophet 
Daniel two very peculiar and definite characteristics of the 
last days. " Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall 
be increased." Now if any well informed and intelligent per- 
son were asked, What have been the leading and distinctive 
characteristic marks of the last half-century, as distinguished 
from any previous period in the world's history ? he would at 
once reply, " steam'locomotion, and the universality of educa- 
tion and spread of scientific knowledge." Where one person 
travelled formerly, ten thousand travel now; universally, in- 
cessantly, and in every corner of the earth, the wheels of 
locomotion are annihilating distance, and facilitating the 
running to and fro of millions, making the inhabitants of the 
most distant quarters of the globe almost like next-door neigh- 
bours. And never before in the history of mankind has this 
or anything like it been the case. Similarly, where one person 
could read and write in the olden time, ten thousand are fairly 
educated now; and where one secret of nature was known 
to the ancients, a thousand are known and turned to practical 
account by the men of our day. Knowledge is increased as 
it never was before ; indeed, the school and the locomotive might 
be adopted as the devices of the nineteenth century. 

Our Lord Himself gave another sign of the closing days of 
this age. He said, " This gospel of the kingdom must first 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 483 

be preached among all nations, and then shall the end 
come." 

It may safely be asserted that never since the words were 
spoken, has the gospel been so widely preached among the 
nations as it has during the present century. Since the year 
1 80 1, when the Church Missionary Society was founded, almost 
all the Missionary Societies in existence have sprung up, as 
well as all the Bible Societies. Within the last fifty years, the 
gospel story has been translated into between two and three 
hundred additional languages, spoken by six or eight hundred 
millions of mankind. Colporteurs are distributing it, and 
preachers expounding it in all lands ; and though there are still 
alas ! countless tribes and peoples in the heart of Africa, in 
the continent of South America, and in the isles of the sea 
who have never yet heard the gospel message, yet we may say 
there is no kingdom, no regularly organized civilized " nation " 
or community, in which it has not been proclaimed, and in 
which it has not won some trophies. When it has been preached 
in all nations, then shall the end come. 

But perhaps there is no sign of the times more solemnly 
indicative to the humble student of Scripture, of the approach 
of the end, than the confident conviction that seems universally 
to prevail in the professing church, and in the world, that all 
things continue as they were, and will so continue. Not only 
is there no expectation of impending judgment, there is a bold 
assumption that no change in the existing order of things is 
probable, or even possible. 

The very idea of a Divine interference in the affairs of this 
world is scouted as foolish and fanatical ; the testimony of his- 
tory to past interferences of the kind is superciliously explained 
away, or plainly pronounced to be myth, not real history, and 
any faith in the testimony of prophecy is regarded as antiquated 
folly. The reign of eternal law is proclaimed, while a Law- 
giver is ignored, the theory of progressive development is 
advocated, and the evidences of supernatural interruptions 
in the past, neglected. The state of popular opinion in 



484 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

Christendom at this hour on this point is foretold with mar- 
vellous exactness by the Apostle Peter, and the true antidote 
to it prescribed. " There shall come in the last days scoffers, 
walking after their own lusts, and saying Where is the promise 
of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things 
continue as they were, since the beginning of the creation. 
For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of 
God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing in the 
water, and out of the water ; whereby the world that then was, 
being overflowed with water perished. But the heavens and 
earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, 
reserved unto fire, against the day of judgment and perdition 
of ungodly men. But beloved be not ignorant of this one 
thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and 
a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concern- 
ing his promise as some men count slackness, but is long- 
suffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that 
all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will 
come, as a thief in the night." 

This pecular form of scoffing unbelief foretold as to charac- 
terize the last days, and most conspicuously characterizing 
these days, has never before prevailed widely in Christendom. 
It is an offspring of advanced scientific knowledge, a result 
and accompaniment of nineteenth-century attainments. The 
ignorance of other ages made men superstitious. Far from 
denying the existence of an invisible and immaterial world, far 
from questioning the possibility of the supernatural, they were 
slaves to credulity, and groundless apprehensions, and fell easy 
victims to the false miracles and lying wonders of a cunning 
and covetous priesthood. Apprehensions of an approaching 
end of the world, were from time to time widely prevalent in 
the dark ages. Bold infidelity, general scepticism as to all 
that is supernatural, gross materialism and positive philosophy, 
the foolhardy presumption that dares to assert " all th; 'e^s 
continue as they were since the beginning of the creats /oi 
and to argue " and will so continue for ever " — these fe; fi] tM 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 485 

are peculiar to the last 150 years, and were never before so 
marked as they are now. 

Were it otherwise, were men willing to heed the testimony 
of the word of God, were they observant of the fast thickening 
signs of the end, were they generally expecting the final crisis, 
we might be perfectly certain, the end would not be near. Such 
is not to be the tone and temper of the last generation. " In 
such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." Never 
was there a day when- men were so firmly convinced, that no 
supernatural event is to be expected, as they are now. But 
"when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction 
cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child ; and 
they shall not escape." 

That the end of this Christian age, that end so bright with 
the glow of coming glory to the true Church, so lurid with the 
fires of approaching judgment to apostate Christendom, so big 
with blessing to Israel, and so full of hope for the nations of 
the earth, — is close at hand, seems for those who accept the 
testimony of Scripture, beyond all reasonable question. 

It is true Israel must first be restored to Palestine ; it is true 
the gospel must probably first be preached more widely even 
than it now is ; it is true that " Babylon ,; must first fall more 
completely, as far as we can judge ; and it is true that these 
things take time. But when we consider the progress that has 
been made in all these directions during the last thirty or forty 
years — the elevation in the condition of the land and people 
of Israel, the removal of Jewish disabilities, the formation of 
the Universal Israelite Alliance, the exploration and survey 
of Palestine, the decay of the Turkish power ; the increase of 
missions, the opening up of China, Japan, and interior Africa, 
the revival of evangelical truth and effort in the Protestant 
Church, and the consequent increase of missionary effort; the 
separations of Church and State, and the disendowments of 
national Churches which have taken place ; the spread of 
infidelity in Christendom, and the increase of open ungodli- 
ness ; the overthrow of despotisms, and the establishment of 



486 CONCLUDING REMARKS, 



democratic forms of government in their place, — we feel that 
supposing we are still thirty or forty years distant from the end 
of the age, all that is predicted may easily come to pass in the 
interval. Events in our day move rapidly, as if they too were 
impelled by steam, so that the apparent rate of progress, 

AND THE APPARENT DISTANCE COINCIDE WELL. 

Unless the entire biblical system of sabbatic chronology, 
have no application at all to the measures of human history as 
a whole, unless the moral and chronological harmonies which 
we have traced between the three dispensations be utterly 
illusive and unreal, unless the divinely instituted typical ritual 
of Leviticus, have no chronologic agreement with the long course 
of redemption history, unless there be no meaning in soli-lunar 
chronology, unless the employment of great astronomic cycles 
to bound the duration of historic and prophetic periods be a 
matter of pure accident, unless the singular septiform epacts of 
these periods be the result of chance, unless in short the 
whole system which we have traced out in the word and works 
of God, be utterly groundless and erroneous — then there can 
be no question that we are living in the very last days of this 
dispensation. 

And what is the great event which is to close it ? Speaking 
broadly and generally, it is the return in glory of the Son of 
God to this earth, to establish therein the kingdom of the 
Most High. Christ when on earth often alluded to the end of 
the age (or world, as aiwvos is often wrongly rendered in the 
A. V.), and He did so most definitely in his parting command 
to his apostles. "Go ye therefore and teach all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
of the Holy Ghost : teaching them to observe all things what- 
soever I have commanded you : and, lo, I am with you always 
even unto the end of age" (Matt, xxviii. 19, 20). 

This commission and this promise taken together, clearly 
imply that evangelistic, missionary, and pastoral labours were 
to continue under the patronage and in the power of an absent 
and ascended Saviour, until the end of the age ; till then He 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 487 

promises to be with his people ; after that, according to a pre- 
viously given promise, He would come again and receive them 
to Himself, that where He is they may be also. He with them 
till the end of the age by his Spirit, while still absent in per- 
son ; they with Him after the end of age, " for ever with the 
Lord." The return of Christ, and the rapture of his Church to 
meet Him in the air, is then the great event. which closes this 
age, and marks the transition to another age — even the millen- 
nial; that personal Epiphany which is the event symbolised 
by the fall of the stone cut out without hands, which destroys 
the image of Gentile monarchy, and becomes a mountain and 
fills the whole earth. We are living within half a century of 
what appears to be the latest close of the Times of the 
Gentiles, which introduces this millennial reign of Christ. 

That the transition from this age to the next, will occupy a 
period, and not be a point of time, seems likely from analogy, 
and seems to be indicated in the two brief supplementary 
periods added to the main one, by the closing words of the angel 
to Daniel. That there will be marked stages in the accomplish- 
ment of the stupendous change from the world that is, to the 
world that shall be, and that it is impossible to fix their dates, 
or to determine beforehand the precise order of the various 
events, revealed as destined to occur in the course of the great 
crisis and consummation, may be freely admitted, without 
detracting in the least from the momentous weight and solemn 
importance of this most blessed conclusion. That the rapture 
will precede the glorious manifestation of Christ with his 
saints, and the marriage of the Lamb antedate the destruction 
of Antichrist and his host, is clear from New Testament pro- 
phecy, but what the interval between the two events may be, 
whether the twinkling of an eye or a longer space of time, 
there are no data to enable us to determine. 

That a period of awful and destructive judgments on apostate 
Christendom, is to prepare the way for the full establishment 
of the millennial throne of Christ, and the world-wide recogni- 
tion of his peaceful righteous sway, is also abundantly clear 



438 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

(2 Thess. i. ii. ; Rev. xix.) ; but the precise nature, duration, 
and effect of these judgments, it is impossible to define. 

And while the chronological revelations of Scripture seem 
to prove that we are living within a few years of the latest close 
of all the prophetic periods, there is nothing whatever to forbid 
the thought that the end may come before that latest close. 
The main measures of the periods may be from the earlier 
termini a quo. We may be already far advanced in the supple- 
mental seventy-five years. If the glorious Epiphany were to 
take place at any time, chronologic prophecy would still have 
been fulfilled, and as the Rapture of the Church precedes 
that Epiphany, who shall say how near that blessed hope 
may be? There is no ground for concluding it will not 
take place this year or next, any more than for asserting 
that it will. An intentional and impenetrable obscurity and 
uncertainty is even now, with all our perception of the Divine 
system of times and seasons, left around this point, and must 
be till the event itself shall occur. Each passing year diminishes 
the number of the few remaining years of this " time of the 
end," somewhere in the course of which, the advent apparently 
must take place, and should therefore quicken our hope, and 
increase our watchfulness : but to the last we shall not know 
the day or the hour. 

This wholesome and divinely appointed ignorance of the 
exact period, is perfectly consistent with an intelligent appre- 
hension of the true chronological character of the days in which 
we live, and a profound conviction that they are emphatically 
and literally, the last days. An approximate knowledge of 
the truth on this great subject is all we can gain, and it is all 
that we require*, anything further would be injurious. Such a 

KNOWLEDGE WAS ALL THAT WAS EVER GRANTED TO THE SAINTS 
OF GOD IN CONNECTION WITH THE FULFILMENT OF OTHER 
CHRONOLOGICAL PROPHECIES IN OTHER DAYS ; FOR PROPHECY 
IS NOT GIVEN TO GRATIFY CURIOSITY, OR TO MINISTER TO MERE 
EXCITEMENT, BUT TO SERVE HIGH AND HOLY MORAL ENDS. 

And our ignorance and uncertainty on the subject, are of a 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 489 

very different nature from those which were appointed for the 
early Christian church. Just as the patriarchs had the promise 
and hope of Christ's first coming, but no clue whatever as 
to the time of that greatly desired event ; while the expecta- 
tions of the faithful in Israel subsequent to the restoration from 
Babylon were definitely guided by the chronologic prophecy 
of the seventy weeks, to the century and decade, though 
not to the very year of Messiah the Prince, so the earlier 
generations of Christians, had the blessed hope of Christ's 
second coming, but no clue whatever as to its period. The 
widest possible range was purposely left, for uncertainty on 
the subject ; they were told that the Master might return in 
the evening, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the 
morning, and they had no idea which period was the most 
probable. For though they held in their hands chronological 
prophecies containing mystic intimations of the appointed 
duration of this dispensation, they knew not the language in 
which the revelation was written, and to them it remained, as 
the Lord had ordained that it should remain, a hidden mystery. 
We are in a widely different position ; not a fresh revelation, 
but new light on old revelations, has by the course of events, 
and by the enlightenings of the Spirit of God been granted to 
us. The facts of history have explained the predictions of 
Scripture ; experience has demonstrated the true scale of the 
chronology of symbolic prophecy, our expectations are conse- 
quently confined to a much narrower range. The evening 
light of the early ages of church history faded away, long long 
ago, into the "midnight" of the dark ages of the great 
Apostasy ; the " cockcrowing " of the Reformation has already 
brightened into the dawn of morning light, and our uncertainty 
is limited to ignorance of the precise moment, at which the 
Sun of Righteousness will rise in visible glory above our horizon. 
The scheme of Divine providence has been by degrees un- 
folded, and the signs of the times assure us, that we are not 
out in our reckoning. We are far advanced in the last days of 
the Christian dispensation ; and though still ignorant of the 



490 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

day and the hour of our Lord's return, we know that that 
great event must be close at hand. 

If the uncertainty of the early Christians, was intended to have 
and calculated to have a sobering, sanctifying and stimulating 
effect on their minds, what should be the effect of this com- 
parative certainty on ours ? If there is immense practical 
power in the thought, the Lord may come at any time; how 
much more in the conviction He is sure to come before many 
years are past. This certainty is one which no previous 
generation of Christians could have had, because the great pro- 
phetic period of 1260 years was never demonstrably fulfilled 
before the complete fall of the temporal power of the Papacy 
in 1870, and the true nature of the Divine system of times and 
seasons, never before demonstrated, as now. The present 
generation ought therefore to exhibit fruits of holy living, and 
earnest service, never seen before, and if this truth were mixed 
with faith in the heart, it would. Hence our deep regret that 
futurist expositions should take off the edge of this mightily 
practical truth j and just as at the Reformation they blinded 
the eyes of Papists to the true character of the Papacy, and 
to their consequent personal duty with regard to it, — so they 
should now blind Protestants to the real nature of the days 
in which we live ; depriving them of the certainty afforded by 
the sure word of prophecy in this time of the end, and throw- 
ing them back on the uncertainty of earlier ages. 

A moment's reflection will show that in the past, while the 
beginnings of the ages and dispensations had general promises 
and predictions only, chronological prophecy was always 

PERMITTED TO THROW ITS SOLEMNLY HELPFUL GUIDING LIGHT 

ox the close. The first prediction of this character ever 
given was that of the 120 years to elapse prior to the flood, 
that great close of the antediluvian age. The second — the 400 
years to the Exodus, marked the close of the entire patriarchal 
dispensation ; the third — the 65 years to elapse before Ephraim's 
overthrow, led up to the close of the kingdom of the ten tribes ; 
and the fourth — the 70 years captivity of Judah, marked out by 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 49* 

its commencement the close of Jewish monarchy, and by its 
own termination, the close of the Babylonian Empire ; the fifth 
— the 490 years to Messiah the Prince, led up the close of the 
Tewish dispensation ; and the remaining three great chronologic 
prophecies of the Bible, the 2520, the 2300 and the seven times 
repeated 1260 years, all indicate the close of the Times of the 
Gentiles, the oft-mentioned " end of the age." The reason seems 
to be, that each fresh age has been inaugurated and introduced 
by miracle on so grand a scale that faith needed for a time no 
further aid than that afforded by history and promise. But as 
the era of miracle receded, the temptation to doubt and un- 
belief strengthened, and God graciously provided the help of 
chronologic prophecy to sustain to the end, the faith and hope 
of his people. They who in this day despise that aid, or 
make it void by fanciful, unhistoric futurist interpretations, 
cast aside an invaluable weapon for the special conflict of these 
closing days. An age which rejects the argument from miracle, 
is confronted by that from the fulfilment of prophecy. As the 
evidence of the first becomes more questionable on account of 
its remote antiquity, that of the second becomes more irresistible 
year by year. Fulfilled prophecy is miracle in the highest 
sphere, — that of mind. It is the ever growing proof ot Divine 
prescience in the authors of sacred Scripture. 

To one who notes the peculiar characteristics of the con- 
dition of Christendom in our day, it seems evident, that the 
testimony which specially needs to be borne throughout its 
length and breadth at this solemn juncture, is a testimony not 
only to the goodness but the severity of God. " Behold 
therefore the goodness and severity of God," says the apostle 
Paul to the Gentile church, speaking of God's dealings with 
Israel; "on them which fell severity, but toward thee good- 
ness if thou continue in his goodness, otherwise thou also shalt 
be cut off" Christendom has no more continued in the good- 
ness of God, than did Israel, and as surely as Israel fell and 
was cut off in judgment, so surely does a still more terrible 
doom await the apostate professing Christian church. 



492 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

It needs faith in Divine revelation to believe this, and 
perhaps few of the clear teachings of Scripture are more 
generally disbelieved in our day j but unbelief will not make 
the promise or the threatening of God of none effect, and 
though myriads may ignore the solemn fact, and though 
myriads more ma)- — as predicted — laugh to scorn the Divine 
denunciations of impending doom, it is at hand. If the Bible 
be true there can be nothing more certain than this, that 
Divine judgment must close this dispensation, and that in 
all probability within a brief period of rime. Introductory and 
premonitory vials of wrath, have already been poured out on 
the Papal kingdoms of Western Europe, and on the Ottoman 
Empire of Eastern Europe ; the sixth vial has been pouring out 
for the last fifty years, and seems to have all but accomplished 
its appointed task, of drying up the Euphrates, or wasting 
away the power of Turkey ; the seventh vial brings the fall of 
Babylon, the marriage of the Lamb, and t/ie final destructio7i of 
Antichrist and all his hosts. It is the vial of the consumma- 
tion, aDd when it is poured forth the great voice out of heaven 
proclaims " it is done." 

The political events of the last century have been the swift 
and sure precursors of the long-foretold destruction with the 
brightness of Christ's coming, which awaits the apostate church 
of this dispensation. But men's eyes are blinded and they see 
it not ! Let the watchmen who do see it, sound the alarm, if 
perchance they may awake some to the danger. Let the 
servants of the Most High preach to an unrepentant world, 
the preaching that He bids them, for ''-jet forty days and 
Nineveh s/iall be destroyed/" As foretold in the Apocalypse, 
all the sore judgments that have been sent on apostate 
Christendom have failed to lead it to repentance (Rev. ix. - 1 ; 
xvi. n), and a contemplation of its actual state affords the 
strongest of all arguments for a belief in its impending doom. 
There is such a thing as the measure of iniquity being full ; 
there is such a thing as the long-suffering of God being ex- 
hausted : 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 493 

Let the universality and intensity of the apostasy of the 
professing Christian church be considered, and the length of 
time during which it has existed, as well as the way in which 
it has rejected every call to repentance. It is not the Papal 
church alone that has become apostate; look at the lands 
where Christianity took its rise, and established itself in the 
earliest centuries. What is the state of the Syrian, the 
Nestorian, the Armenian, the Maronite, the Coptic churches, 
with their millions of so-called Christian adherents ? They 
are systems in which the grossest ignorance, idolatry, priest- 
craft, and corruption prevail, and in which the true gospel is 
almost as much ignored as among the heathen themselves. 
They who have traversed these lands, witnessed the unmean- 
ing and degrading bodily exercises, and heard the endless 
vain repetitions which pass in their churches for Christian 
worship, have marvelled how anything so unlike the religion 
of Christ and his apostles, can retain even the name of 
Christianity. It should be remembered also that the majority 
of the population of these once Christian lands, long ago 
abandoned even the name of Christ, and under the pressure 
of Mohammedan conquest and persecution, became avowedly 
followers of the false prophet. 

When from these smaller and more ancient Eastern churches 
we turn to the great Greek church with its ninety millions of 
members, and all its minor subdivisions of Syrian, orthodox and 
schismatic, Bulgarian and Russian, matters are little better : 
idolatry is universal, and the prevalent ignorance of the true 
gospel almost as great as in China or Japan. Do not the very 
missionary efforts we, as Protestants, are making in all these 
lands, prove, that we are driven by the appalling facts of the 
case to regard them as little more enlightened than heathen 
countries, as possessed merely of the names and forms of 
Christianity, but as destitute of its spirit and power ? 

And what pen can paint in its true tints, the dark depths of 
apostasy in which Papal Europe has long been plunged ! 
Familiarity with its enormity may blunt our sense of its awful 



494 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

guilt, but this continuance in sin only serves to enhance the 
long slumbering wrath of God. Reformations have separated 
fragments from an idolatrous and Christless church, but the 
church as a whole has remained unreformed. Two hundred 
millions of souls are still bound in its hopeless bondage of soul- 
destroying error ; its blasphemous head still lords it, with ever 
increasing claims to Divine prerogatives, over all these multi- 
tudes. Religion is there, but it is a hollow mocking form : 
worship is there, but it consists in lip service and genuflexions, 
it is not worship in spirit and in truth ; the word of God is 
there, but it is locked in an unknown tongue, and studiously 
withheld from the people; adoration is there, but it is the ador- 
ation of saints and angels, of Pope and Virgin Mary, of picture 
and crucifix, of statues and dressed-up dolls, of shrines and 
relics, and of a breaden God. Before all these they bow ! 
How low they bow ! How low the blind leaders of the blind 
bend, before the idol-God they create ! Dressed in fine linen 
and gorgeous silk, in lace and scarlet, and robes of glittering 
gold, they lead the people from the pure spiritual religion of 
Jesus Christ, to holy sacraments without regenerating power, to 
holy places of stone and marble, to holy fumes of burnt-wood, 
to holy days of their own appointment, to holy water which can 
never wash away sin, to holy candles which enlighten no dark 
mind, to the mass, to confession, to penance, to indulgences, 
to extreme unction, to anything, even-thing, except to God 
the Judge of all, to Jesus Christ the only Saviour, and to the 
Scriptures which testify of Him. 

How much longer shall the poison-bearing vine of this Papal 
apostasy cumber the earth with its rank branches, and destroy 
men with its fatal clusters of falsehood ? How much longer 
shall this man of sin and son of perdition show himself as God 
on earth, and blasphemously claim to be infallible? How 
much longer shall the nations of Europe be by it deceived 
and deluded into foul superstitions, or driven to revolt against 
God in open infidelity ? Are these things to be suffered to 
continue under the name of the religion of Christ ? Zion has 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 495 

become Babylon, and the professing church a harlot ; and 
Babylon has grown old in sin, and become ripe for retribution. 
All the judgments that have been sent on her, have failed to 
lead her to repentance, all protests against her corruption have 
proved powerless to abate one iota of her idolatries and false 
assumptions. Rome has proved herself irreformable and de- 
serving of the dreadful doom so long decreed against her. 

At the door of the apostate church of Rome lies the guilt 
of having given rise to modern continental infidelity, that 
plague which is ruining in its turn untold millions. Who shall 
number the so-called Christians in Europe and elsewhere, who 
scorn all religion as hypocrisy, and sneer at all sacred truth as 
legends and lies ; who worship only self and mammon and 
pleasure, and live in the unceasing pursuit of vanity ? What 
thousands of such, openly deride and deny Jesus Christ, and 
even make a mock at God ; they refuse to the Creator a place 
in his own creation, and question his very existence. 

And when we turn our eyes to the reformed Protestant 
churches of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and England, what 
do we behold ? The power of godliness to a greater extent, a 
purer creed, an open Bible, an educated people, a general 
respect for the things of God, and some vital godliness, some 
faith. But even here how much of covert or open infidelity, 
what rationalism, what scepticism, what " broad church " views, 
what oppositions of science falsely so called ! What world- 
liness, what national sins, what confusion and strife in the 
church, what loathsome vice and ungodliness in the world ! 
National churches honeycombed with infidelity, even when 
not relapsing back to Popery under another name, and Non- 
conformist churches fast admitting the same deadly leaven. 
Where can we find a Christianity worthy of Christ ? Where 
a church, like a chaste virgin, fit to be his bride ? 

The Christian church as a witness for God in the world has 
failed, like the Jewish nation, and become apostate. There 
is a little flock, there is a true Church, but its members are 
scattered abroad and almost invisible in the great Babylon; 



496 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

they are the seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to 
Baal, they are the called and chosen and faithful who follow 
the Lamb, they are those who have turned to God from idols, 
to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from 
heaven ; they are those who have not the form only, but the 
power of godliness, those who keep themselves unspotted from 
the world, and overcome through faith. They are found in 
every section of the professing church, and the Lord knoweth 
those that are his — " They shall be mine saith the Lord of 
Hosts, in the day when I make up my jewels." 

But for the rest, — for the vast professing body which bears 
the name of Christ, it has not continued in the goodness of 
God, it has turned his grace into licentiousness, its sentence 
is gone forth, it must be "cut off." The long-suffering of 
God has been abundantly manifested, it is right that his holy 
severity should be again revealed. The professing church has 
long been unworthy of the sacred name it bears, and of the 
high and holy responsibility of being God's witness on earth, 
which belongs to it ; it is time it should cease to hold the 
position it has so fearfully forfeited. Instead of being the 
instrument of spreading the truth of the gospel among men, it 
is the worst hindrance to their attaining that knowledge of God, 
and of Jesus Christ whom He has sent, in which life eternal 
lies; like the Pharisees of old it stands as the great obstruction, 
neither entering itself into the kingdom, nor suffering those 
who would, to enter in. The name of God is blasphemed 
among the nations, by reason of the corruption of the pro- 
fessing church ; the light that should have been in it, is become 
darkness, and great is that darkness ! The church is con- 
founded with the world, and the true saints are strangers in its 
society ; it is no longer the pillar and ground of the truth, it 
is the hotbed of heresy, false doctrine, and corruption of every 
kind. What contrast can be more complete, than that between 
the church as Christ intended it to be, and the church as it 
now exists in the world ! An end must come to all this ! Not 
only does the word of God predict it, not only does our own 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 497 

sense of righteousness demand it, but the solemn analogies of 
history distinctly intimate it. Let the undeniable fact that 
past apostasies brought down the judgment they deserved, 
forewarn men what must be the end of the existing apostasy 
of the professing people of God. Babylon must fall ! Great 
Babylon must come in remembrance before God, who will give 
unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath, 
for her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remem- 
bered her iniquities ! The testimony of the Apocalypse is full 
and fearful as to the doom that is now impending over Chris- 
tendom. He who destroyed Pagan Rome, is about to destroy 
Papal Rome and all kindred apostasies ; He who punished 
Jerusalem is about to punish Babylon ; heaven waits to rejoice 
over her fall. The harpers on the crystal sea, the myriad 
martyrs who overcame her specious seductions, and endured 
her cruel torments, resisting unto blood her soul-destroying 
errors and superstitions, — wait to make heaven reverberate 
with the melodious voice of their triumph, over her utter 
downfall, and fiery destruction. The same severity of God, 
illustrated of old in the flood, in the plagues of Egypt, and in 
the fall o r Jerusalem, is to be exhibited afresh in the cutting off 
of the apostate Christian Church ; and the analogies of chron- 
ology teach us, that the great change and termination of the 
present state of things is near at hand. When the "seven 
times " of the patriarchal age of human history were finished, 
Egypt fell, and the Exodus of Israel took place. When the 
" seven times " of the Shemitic or Jewish age expired, Messiah 
appeared ; and Israel, having filled up the measure of its iniquity 
by rejecting Him, was rejected in its turn, and given up by 
God to judgment. And now the " seven times " of this Gentile 
age are all but run out; the dispensation of the Christian 
Church has produced an apostasy worse than any preceding dis- 
pensation, — and shall the end be different ? Only in this respect, 
that the judgment predicted is more terrible, as the sin has been 
more fearful and prolonged ! Babylon must fall, and her fall 
will be great, for " strong is the Lord God who judgeth her." 

K K 



i-i c::::lud:::z ?.z:.:aeks. 

The prospect of the judgments which are to bring to a 
close this dispensation, and which are described in terms of 
appalling strength by inspired apostles (2 Thessaionians ii; 
2 Peter in. : Revelation xviii., xis.), cannot in itself be an 

;.:::; :: e :::e :: lie C::i:::i it:.::. I: zzzsi. ~iei iiey 
realize it, excite in his people, the compassions of Christ ; 
mz i:iie rieri. is zztj see iie ..:::::/ ~:~ : ~ ;: i:z i:e 
only way of escape, to weep, as their Master wept over Jeru- 
salem, in the prospect of its coming doom, and to exclaim 
-;—_■_ H11. ■■ Z: :i:i iiie: ii:~i:. :.: leis: in tjiis :'iy 1: \ :':.;- 
ihinrs tin: -eli-i :: :iy :r;:r Z ;.: z:~ :.ev ire !ii£ fr:za 
thine eyes!" 

Ye:. — _iile =:rr:~j:i- in 7iris:l_iie :: 11: : ::::::. ~e cir. :.'_•: 
acquiesce in Christlike righteousness with the just judgments of 
God. It needs but a glance over the wide extent and awful 
character of the evils which those judgments are to remove, 
ni lit ':::; : = :'.::':'. e. niii.z'izZ. mi uziversil ilessizrs -rr'iLSi 
they are to introduce, to make a true Christian even from 
motives of humanity desire the hastening of the day of God. 
Iz is- iii :::: ::i:.i::::zi. is ~ii :ie nisf-nes sin :■:" sii. 
if our standard of human doty and human privilege, had not 
ieei ieiisei ':y ires :: i.::iiii:ii:e "1:1 :iii = s is iiey ire. 
rf our ideal of the destiny of mankind was the true one,— that 
it is, "to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever/*— the present 
s:i:e :::'i: rriit — ::ii ~-yiiz ill ..: ~z.11 zzit: ziz zzizitiztii, 
iii — : r.i iniirle~: l:z ± izrs f:: 1 :i:i_: 

T~ : Tills :: :ie i::i::i :i:e ire ii.itl srill 11 ieirien 
iirlziess. seisiil iii : r i:::.i: is :i:i::l- selisi 111 :nel is 
wild beasts, bowing down to the creature, and knowing nothing 
of the Creator : of the other third, a hundred millions, cursed 
with the degrading creed of the false prophet, are almost 
eciiHv sensiil 11; esuHr fen::: is iii zriel. ~'~~"e :iey 
i: 1:1:1: It : 1 srill n:re ;v rslisiieniii 111 ret:rii = 7Zs 
::'.;• 1:1 r : l:ii:-i 1:11:1: ire :::i:::::li :-v;lvei m i'zt 
P111I ii:s:;.sy. ::::: :.::::: iZieiy ::::li. is i: :is 'Uriel: : "::~ 
; 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 499 

little is his character understood, or his will done, or his 
communion sought ! And in the small remainder, in the 
Protestant world, oh, what national sins bring national miseries 
even here, and how little is God either enjoyed or glorified ! 
Take England, with her opium trade, her drink traffic, and her 
legalized immorality. Heathen China conceives us and our 
religion to be diabolic rather than Divine, since we deliberately 
persist in ruining her million-peopled empire for the sake of 
gold. At home the drink fiend is destroying our people and 
our national prosperity ; sixty thousand drunkards die a miser- 
able and disgraceful death annually in our land ; murdered 
wives and starving children, and an immense and ever-increas- 
ing pauper, criminal, and lunatic population, cry aloud for some 
restraint to be put on the fell destroyer ; but they cry in vain ; 
our Government suffer and even encourage the traffic. It 
is acknowledged on all hands that in the metropolis of the 
greatest Protestant country in the world, where, if anywhere 
on earth, pure Christianity is acknowledged, there, instead of 
God being glorified and enjoyed, his laws are by the masses, 
trampled under foot, and sin and misery in one form or other 
abound. 

Where in the wide world can we then find purity and peace ? 
Where holiness and happiness? Oh, the foul lives, the defiled 
consciences, the troubled minds, the broken hearts, the crying 
oppressions, the multiplied miseries of our race ! What a world 
of sin and woe is contained in that one word, war, and in that 
other word, slavery ! What famines and pestilences, and revo- 
lutions and massacres arise from misgovernment ! How truly 
the whole creation groans, and travails in pain together, waiting 
for the manifestation of the sons of God ! The deepest and 
truest compassion for the sufferings of humanity must prompt 
the cry, How long, O Lord ? And apart altogether from the joy 
that is to be brought to her hy the revelation of Jesus Christ, the 
church must long for his coming, that the creation itself may 
be delivered from the bondage of corruption, and brought into 
the glorious liberty of the sons of God. Israel's conversion, 



5oo CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

and the world's jubilee of liberty and gladness, date alike from 
the coming of the Lord with all his saints, to execute judgment 
on the ungodly. Of the blessed condition of things which 
shall succeed, during the world's millennial sabbath, Scripture 
gives many a glorious sketch ! and though we may be, and 
must be, unable to image it to ourselves in its detail, we know 
its broad essential features, and they imply almost all we can 
desire. Satan, the source of all sin, the great deceiver and 
seducer of men, is to be bound, imprisoned, rendered perfectly 
powerless and inoperative ; Christ, the source of all blessing, 
spiritual and temporal, is to reign, to govern the nations of the 
earth Himself, suffering no sin or oppression, and protecting 
the poor and needy. The seventy-second Psalm, the thirty- 
second chapter of Isaiah, and similar scriptures, describe his 
glorious, peaceful, righteous reign, and its blessed results to 
mankind. 

And while compassion for our fellow-creatures would make 
us long for the dawn of the day of Christ, how much more, 
desire for his glory ! Can we, who own Him Lord, be content 
to have Him despised and rejected still by his ancient people 
Israel, denied, mocked, and insulted by the vast infidel host, 
displaced from his rightful throne, by this self-styled Vicar on 
earth, robbed of all his peculiar glories by an apostate priest- 
hood, unknown to the great majority of the sinners He died 
to save, poorly obeyed and honoured by his best friends and 
followers, and practically forgotten and disowned by the mass 
of those who bear his name ? Can we be content with a 
continuance of this treatment of the only begotten Son in 
whom God is well-pleased ? Can we endure to see this treat- 
ment still accorded to Him who for our sakes humbled Him- 
self and became of no reputation, and took upon Him the 
form of a servant, and became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the cross ? Is He to have nothing but what He had 
before, the adoration and love of the heavenly hosts ? Or, 
rather, is not every knee to bow to Him, and every tongue to 
confess Him Lord, to the don- of God the Father ? Are not 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 501 

our hearts impatient for the day when earth shall own her 
King, and Israel its Messiah, and our blessed Lord alone be 
exalted ? Do we not cry, — 

Our longing eyes would fain behold 

That bright and blessed brow, 
Once wrung with bitterest anguish, wear 

Its crown of glory now ? 

And does not the cry gush from the depth of our souls ? 
The near approach of the day of Christ, must rejoice the heart 
that adores Him ; for never till then will He have his rigrftful 
place, or receive from the sons of men, the love and the sub 
mission which He so richly deserves. 

And without being selfish, we rejoice and must rejoice for 
our own sakes in the prospect of the near approach of the end 
of the age, notwithstanding its accompanying judgments. 

For whatever the exact portion it may bring to others, what- 
ever its immediate and precise effect on Israel, on Christendom, 
and on the heathen nations of the earth, — and there maybe room 
for some doubts and differences of opinion as to these, — there 
can be no question whatever, as to the portion it brings to the 
true church and to each individual Christian. " In a moment, 
in the twinkling of an eye," the dead in Christ shall rise, and 
the living " in Christ " be changed, the corruptible put on in- 
corruption, and the mortal immortality, when the Lord Himself 
descends from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the arch- 
angel and the trump of God ; we shall be caught up together 
in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we be 
for ever with the Lord. We shall see Him, and be like Him, 
for we shall see Him as He is ; we shall go in, clad in pure 
linen, clean and white, to the marriage supper of the Lamb; 
we shall, as his blood-bought bride, sit with Him on hk 
throne, and share his glory, according to his word, " the 
glory which Thou hast given Me, I have given them." Simple, 
clear, abundant, and unmistakable are the predictions with 
reference to our portion at the coming of the Lord. " It is a 
righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to those 



502 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

that trouble you ; and to you who are troubled rest with 
us when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with 
his mighty angels, in flaming tire taking vengeance on those 
that know not God, and obey not the Gospel of our Lord 
Jesus Christ : who shall be punished with everlasting de- 
struction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory 
of his power ; when He shall come to be glorified in his 

SAINTS, AND ADMIRED IN ALL THEM THAT BELIEVE ill that 

day" (2 Thess. i. 6-10). Rest ! that is to be one feature of 
our portion, rest with Christ, rest with the saints and martyrs 
that are gone before. Rest from conflict with the world, 
the flesh, and the devil ; rest from the life and walk of faith, 
in the more glorious life and walk of sight, for we shall be- 
hold his face, and see Him, whom not having seen we love ; 
rest of heart in love's full fruition, in complete and eternal 
union with our Lord, — the marriage of the Lamb; rest of 
mind, in perfect knowledge, for then shall we know, even as 
also we are known; rest from the burden of this body of 
humiliation, rest from labouring in vain, and spending our 
strength for nought, rest from all care and fear, from all strife, 
and all pain and sorrow ; and from the heart-ache produced by 
the daily sights and sounds of ungodliness. The day of Christ 
shall bring rest to the weary ! Nor rest only, but fulness of 
joy, and pleasures for evermore ! The joy of seeing Him 
glorified and acknowledged by all, and the joy of being glori- 
fied and acknowledged ourselves by Him; the joy of perfect 
holiness, the joy of possessing a new and incorruptible spiritual 
body in which to serve Him as we cannot do here, and to 
enjoy his glory, as would now be impossible. " Beloved ! now 
are we the sons of God ; but it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be; but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be 
like Him for we shall see Him as He is." Ours shall be the 
joy, not only of being like Him ourselves, but of beholding all 
those we love like Him also — the joy of seeing eye to eye, and 
of having every feeling in perfect unison, with all the children 
of God, the joy of meeting the saints of other days, the 



CONCLUDING REMARKS. 503 

patriarchs and prophets and apostles, and the noble army of 
martyrs; of seeing, crowned with crowns of life, those who 
loved not their lives to the death — the joy of unhindered com- 
munion and worship, the joy of perpetual and perfect service. 
And all these joys sweetened by the assurance that they are 
ours for ever, that we shall go no more out from the temple of 
the immediate presence of God, that we are to be for ever with 
the Lord ! Earth's millennium is to end, like all previous 
dispensations, in apostasy and judgment ; but to the risen saints 
no change, no apostasy can ever come. Christ is their life; 
because He lives, they live also, in Him and with Him indis- 
solubly and eternally one. Their eternal state begins at his 
Epiphany, at the Second Advent for which we wait. 

Men and brethren, are these things so ? Have we a hope 
thus full of glory, and does our hope draw nigh, yea very nigh ? 
" What manner of persons then ought we to be in all holy con- 
versation and godliness ? " Ought we not to be persons filled 
with faith, even as the world is filled with scepticism ? Ought 
we not to be moved with fear for the ungodly around us, and 
burning with earnest zeal for their salvation ? If the day of 
Christ be so near, how should we employ the brief remaining 
interval ? Many a task which it might have been wise and 
well to undertake in the earlier days of the dispensation, would 
be sadly out of place now ! This is no time for controversies 
about ecclesiastical organizations and abstruse questions of 
doctrine. To proclaim far and wide throughout the earth the 
everlasting Gospel before it is too late ; to lay hold of men and 
women and pull them out of Sodom ere the fire from heaven 
fall ; to cry aloud as regards Babylon, " Come out of her, my 
people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive 
not of her plagues;" to spend and be spent in seeking to 
rescue the perishing, this is the work that becomes us. To 
warn the world that the sword of destruction is coming, to ex- 
plain to men that the long-suffering of God is for salvation, 
and that it is nearly over, and to live as though we believed 
these things — this is our plain duty. 



504 CONCLUDING REMARKS, 

When the destruction of Jerusalem, and the ruin of Palestine 
were approaching, when fearful judgments were on the eve of 
being poured forth on the Jewish nation, our Lord forewarned 
his disciples against laying up treasures for themselves upon 
earth. He counselled and commanded them to lodge what- 
ever treasures they had beyond the spoiler's reach. What the 
position of these early Christians in Palestine was, such is our 
position now. The judgment of God is at hand : destruction 
is about to break forth upon Christendom. In the coming 
conflagration, the church and her earthly possessions shall be 
parted. What a burning up of hoarded wealth shall take place 
then ! Let us be warned in time. Let us make haste to lay 
out all our buried talents in Christ's service, instead of laying 
them up for condemnation and confusion of face. Let none 
of us imitate an unbelieving selfish world. Oh the obstinate 
folly of those who spend all their strength in gathering worth- 
less fuel for the flames of that great day ! Let every Christian 
bring forth his hidden treasures, if he has any, and use them as 
they are most needed, without delay, lest that day should come 
upon us as a thief, and our wealth become a witness against 
us. There is a deadly famine in the world. Men are perish- 
ing in every land for lack of that which we possess. We have, 
and they have not, the gospel. We have, and they have not, 
eternal life. Let us expend our means and lives in taking to 
them, or sending to them, that which has saved our souls, that 
we may be clear from the blood of all men, and may by all 
means save some. Love to men and love to God alike demand 
it, and the example of an impoverished and crucified Redeemer 
points us to this path. Behold the footprints of Jesus ! Let 
us trace and tread them till He comes ! How much there is 
to be done for a dying world ! How little time in which to do 
it ! Let us be up and doing. It is the evening of this dis- 
pensation. The harvest — alas, how little reaped — is red with 
the glow of the setting sun. Who will bring in these waiting 
sheaves? China's millions are there; India's countless idol- 
aters, and Africa's innumerable degraded sons are there. The 



CONCLUDING REMARKS, 505 

children of error and superstition, the mass, the multitude are 
there. Not a few whom we personally know and love are 
there. Let us reap while the light lasts. Bring in these golden 
sheaves ! Now, or never, bring them in / 

Brethren, let us lift up our heads, for our redemption draweth 
nigh. We see on every hand the signs, the predicted signs of 
the nearness of the Advent. Let us not wait till it comes to 
rejoice in it. Let us rejoice now, because the joy of Christ 
and of his church is near. Superstition's fall and error's flight, 
the casting out of Satan, and the coming of the" King are nigh .' 
Ye graves, how soon shall ye give up your prey ! Resurrection 
life and glory, how soon shall ye burst upon us ! Children of 
the coming kingdom, this is no time for gloom, for mourning, 
or for tears,— let us rejoice, for our redemption, long waited-for 
— our longed-for redemption is at hand. 

And you who neither desire nor dread that day— you who 
love not our Lord Jesus Christ — you whose busy thoughts, 
and whose warm affections are still in the world, whose 
motives and objects and treasures are of the earth, you whose 
minds are in darkness ; whose consciences, when they speak 
at all, accuse ; whose hearts and souls are indifferent to eternal 
truth, destitute of real holiness, dead to Him in whom you live 
— dead to God — through the darkness and the death of your 
souls, let the light of the gospel you have heard but never 
understood, now shine at length ! 

Hear ye the word of the Lord. God who is light and love, 
" God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, 
not imputing their trespasses unto them ; and hath committed 
unto us the word of reconciliation. Now then we are ambas- 
sadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us ; we 
pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God. For 
He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin ; that 
we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Oh 
glorious gospel of the blessed God! Shine, shine in some 
dark heart through these most joyful words of saving truth ! 
Jesus made sin for sinners ! The Son of God suffering in the 



506 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 

sinner's place ! The sinner who believes, — who trusts in Him 
justified and saved ! The darkness is past, the true light now 
shineth. O thou who hast hated Him without a cause, He 
takes thy place, He gives thee his ! 

O Thou who hast taken on Thyself humanity, that Thou 
mightest bear our griefs, and carry our sorrows, and atone for 
all our sins, — Thou whose loud expiring cry upon the cross rung 
through the universe the triumphant truth that our redemption 
is accomplished, that its battle has been fought, its victory won ; 
the foe vanquished ; sin cancelled, made an end of, and known 
no more, — Thou whose tender sympathies and whose immortal 
love surpassing knowledge are with us still, whose sacred pre- 
sence unseen, but ever felt, guards and guides thy redeemed in 
all their pilgrim way, — Thou who art coming in the brightness 
of thy majesty, in the sweetness of thy grace, in the fulness of 
thy strength, to finish our redemption, and complete thy triumph 
over all our fears, and all our foes, — Thou whose unchangeable 
purpose it is to surround thyself with the spotless beauty of a 
new creation, whose voice shall yet proclaim the renovation of 
a ruined world, the completion of the conquest of our evil by 
thy good, the consummation of the moral movement of all 
these ages carried forward by thine unwearied Spirit in the souls 
of men, the perfecting of thy redeemed in the holy image of 
their Redeemer ; whose faithful hand shall yet finish the true 
temple of Jehovah, the living temple of his fulness, and habi- 
tation of his glory for ever and for ever, — Thou whose latest 
promise and last recorded utterance is, "Surely I come 
quickly," and whose coming is now near at hand — Life of our 
life — Light of our light — God manifested — God with us — our 
everlasting all — we long, we watch, we wait to welcome Thee, 
— come as Th 
Lord Jesus 1 " 



APPENDICES. 



APPENDIX A. 

Soli-lunar Cycles, and their Relation to the 
Chronology of History. 

i. levitical chronology soli-lunar. 

THE divinely ordained Levitical chronology was soli-lunar ; 
i.e., it was regulated by the revolutions of both sun and 
moon. Its years were solar, for they followed the seasons, 
as in the various ordinances connected with the ingathering of 
the fruits of the earth ; while its months were strictly lunar — 
not artificial months, but lunations — certain ordinances being 
connected with the recurrence of every new moon. The ad- 
justment of solar to lunar years was effected by the inter- 
calation of months, as the epact grew by repetition to complete 
lunations. 

II. TYPICAL FEASTS REGULATED BY LUNATIONS. 

The feasts of the Lord, representing the history of redemp- 
tion, were connected with certain days of lunations and phases of 
lunar fulness ; as the passover with the tenth and fourteenth 
day of the first month ; the feast of unleavened bread with the 
fifteenth ; the feast of trumpets, the day of atonement, and the 
feast of tabernacles, with the first, tenth, and fifteenth day of 
the seventh month, etc. Lunar revolutions were the chrono- 
metric wheels measuring the intervals of the Levitical calendar. 

III. CLOSENESS OF THE ADJUSTMENT. 

There is a close adaptation in lunar phases to the septiform 
arrangements of the calendar. The earliest phasis or appear- 



5io APPENDIX. 



ance of the new moon occurs when the moon is eighteen hours 
old. Sir Isaac Newton mentions in his work on the Prophe- 
cies of Daniel that this number of hours was indicated by the 
rule which the Jews observed in regulating the commencement 
of their months, and to which they gave a name whose numeri- 
cal value is eighteen. Now, from the eighteenth hour of earliest 
phasis to full moon is exactly fourteen days, which was the 
interval appointed to extend in the first month to the passover, 
which thus coincided with full moon ; and thus the fifteenth 
day, which was the first of unleavened bread in the first month, 
and the fifteenth day, which was the first of the feast of taber- 
nacles in the seventh month, immediately followed the time of 
lunar fulness, in harmony with the octave, or new creation, 
character of these feasts. 

IV. REMARKABLE ADJUSTMENT IN THE JUBILEE— THE 6oO 

LUNATIONS. 

The nature and closeness ot this adjustment was very re- 
markable in the case of the jubilee. The jubilee reckoning, 
regulating important civil arrangements in the land of Canaan, 
began with the day on which Israel crossed Jordan and entered 
Palestine. Like the sabbatic law, of which it was an expan- 
sion, its point of commencement is thus defined, " when ye be 
come into the land " etc. (Lev. xxv.) Now, as the jubilee was 
regulated by years, for it recurred every forty-ninth year at the 
time of the autumnal harvest, and was also regulated by months, 
for it was reckoned from the tenth day of the first month when 
Israel crossed Jordan, and^ the jubilee day was the tenth day of 
the seventh month (that of atonement), it was important that 
the year and months should closely agree. It is most inter- 
esting to observe that such is their natural adjustment that, in 
the first place, forty-nine years form a soli-lunar cycle ; and in 
the second place the interval from the tenth day of the first 
month of the first year, to the tenth of the seventh month of 
the forty-ninth, is exactly 600 lunations. 

(1) Forty-nine complete years are a soli-lunar cycle containing 



APPENDIX. 511 



606 lunations. The 606 lunations are less than forty-nine solar 
years by id. 7I1. 58m. ; an agreement of the month and year 
in the jubilee sufficiently close to render the intercalation of an 
extra month unnecessary in any period under one thousand 
years. 

(2) The interval from the tenth day of the first month of the 
first year, to the tenth of the seventh month in the forty-ninth 
year, was exactly 600 lunations ; (forty-eight solar years, six 
lunar months, nine days, and fourteen hours of a tenth day, or 
17,7 1 8d. 8h., are the measures of 600 lunations.) It should be 
observed that the day of atonement was reckoned from the 
evening of the ninth day to the evening of the tenth, " in 
the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto even shall 
ye rest " (marginal reading). 

It will be seen from this, that the jubilee redemption rest 
followed immediately on the expiration of the complete period 
of 600 months. As 600 months are exactly fifty lunar years, 
the fiftieth lunar year terminated on the day of atonement, on 
which day the jubilee year commenced. The jubilee year, which 
is called the fiftieth, extended from the day of atonement in 
the forty-ninth year to the same date in the fiftieth year, and 
was thus an overlapping year, the course of jubilees being 49 + 
49 + 49 years, etc. 

V. IMPORTANT ANALOGOUS ADJUSTMENT IN THE "SEVENTY 

weeks " — the 6000 lunations ; or, the correspondence 
between the time of our Lord's death, in the " seventy 
weeks/' and that of the day of atonement and liber- 
ation in the jubilee. 
There was a coincidence between the time of our Lord's 
death and the day of passover, a fact of very deep interest 
and importance in connection with the fulfilment in Christ of 
the Divine prophecies and foreshadowings of redemption. As 
our Lord's death coincided with the passover day in the first 
month, it could not coincide with the day of atonement in the 
seventh; yet the high priest entering within the veil on the 



Si 2 APPENDIX. 

day of atonement, set forth our Lord's entrance into heaven 
Itself after He had obtained for us eternal redemption. It was 
impossible that the one event should fall on two distinct days ; 
but was it not possible that our Lord's death, while coinciding 
with a passover day, should also have been accomplished at a 
time in some way analogous, and strikingly analogous, to that 
occupied by the great atoning day when the high priest entered 
within the veil? An attentive study of the subject will show 
that such a coincidence existed. 

The day of atonement was annual, and its forty-ninth occur- 
rence was the day of jubilee. 

The " seventy weeks " appointed to extend from the going 
forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem 
unto Messiah the Prince, was an enlarged jubilee — the former 
being forty-nine and the latter 490 years. 

Now, the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, by 
which He atoned for sin, brought in everlasting righteousness, 
and entered within the veil, even into heaven itself, were ac- 
complished at the very time in the 490 years which perfectly 
answers to that of the atoning day in the forty-nine years jubilee. 
In order to demonstrate this it will be necessary to show the 
exact date from which the 490 years are reckoned, and also 
the date of the crucifixion. 

The terminal point from which the 490 years are reckoned 
is " the going forth of the command to restore and to build 
Jerusalem," or the beginning of the passover month in the 
year 457 b.c. Of this we subjoin satisfactory evidence, drawn 
principally from the careful calculations of Sir Isaac Newton, 
with reference to the exact date of the seventh year of Arta- 
xerxes in which, according to the testimony of Ezra (chap, vii.), 
this edict went forth, and this restoration commenced. The 
record of several eclipses which occurred in the reigns of Darius 
and Cambyses enabled Sir Isaac Newton to fix the required 
date with great accuracy. 

Our Lord's passion is assigned by Lactantius, Augustine, 
Origen, Tertullian, and other ancient authors to the year a.d. 29, 



APPENDIX. 513 



and the correctness of this conclusion has been confirmed 
by Brown ("Ordo Saeclorum," sec. 2), and at a later date by 
Clinton (" Fasti Romani," p. 326). The interval between B.C. 
457 and a.d. 29 is 485 years, and that period contains 6000 lu- 
nations, less 41-42 days. Now, the interval from our Lord's 
death to His ascension was 41-42 days ; therefore 485 solar 
years, terminating with our Lord's death, together with the 
41-42 days which followed, to His ascension, are 6000 lu- 
nations. We have previously shown that 600 lunations mea- 
sured the interval in the jubilee which terminated with the 
day of atonement, — the tenth day of the seventh month 01 
the forty-ninth year ; it therefore follows that the time of the 
occurrence of the true atonement, and entrance " into heaven 
itself" in the 490 years, was in marked and perfect corre- 
spondence with the time of the typical atonement on the day 
of jubilee in the forty-nine years. 

Proofs of the correctness of these conclusions will be found 
further on. In the first edition of this book, we assigned, in 
accordance with the most trustworthy authorities, the years 
B.C. 457 and a.d. 29 as those of the beginning of the " seventy 
weeks," and of our Lord's crucifixion ; it has only been in 
correcting for a second edition that we have discovered the 
deeply interesting and important proportion which the interval 
connecting these termini bears to that which extended in the 
marvellous Levitical type to the great day of atonement and 
jubilee. 

VI. THE GROUNDS OF THE CHRONOLOGY HERE FOLLOWED, 
(i) As tO THE TERMINAL POINT FROM WHICH THE " SEVENTY 

weeks " are to be reckoned, we quote the following from 
the work of Sir Isaac Newton on the Prophecies of Daniel, 
part 1, ch. 10. 

" ' Seventy weeks are determined (or " cut out ") upon thy people and 
upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression.' 

" Here, by putting a week for seven years, are reckoned 490 years from 
the time that the dispersed Jews should be re-incorporated into a people 

L L 



514 APPENDIX. 



and a holy city until the death and resurrection of Christ. . a . Now 
the dispersed Jews became a people and city when they first returned into 
a polity, or body politic, and this was in the seventh year of Artaxerxes 
Longimanus, when Ezra returned with a body of Jews from captivity and 
revived the Jewish worship, and, by the king's commission, to judge and 
govern the people according to the laws of God and the king. (Ezra vii. 
7, 25.) There were but two returns from captivity — Zerubbabel's and 
Ezra's ; in Zerubbabel's they had only commission to build the temple ; in 
Ezra's they first became a polity, or city, by a government of their own. 
Now, the years of this Artaxerxes began about two or three months after 
the summer solstice, and his seventh fell in with the third year of the 
eighteenth Olympiad ; and the latter part thereof, wherein Ezra went up to 
Jerusalem, was in the year of the Julian period, 4257 {i.e. B.C. 457) ; 
• • 

" The grounds of the chronology here followed I will now set down as 
"briefly as I can. 

" The Peloponnesian war began in spring, An. I, Olymp. 8j (B.C. 432), 
Diodorus, Eusebius, and all other authors agree. It began two months 
before Pythodorus ceased to be Archon (Thucyd. 1. 2), that is, in April, two 
months before the end of the Olympic year. Now, the years of this war 
are most certainly determined by the fifty years distance of its first year 
from the transit of Xerxes inclusively (Thucyd. 1. 2), or forty-eight years 
exclusively (Eratosth, apud Clem. Alex.); by the sixty- nine years distance of 
its end, or twenty-seventh year, from the beginning of Alexander's reign in 
Greece ; by the acting of the Olympic games in its fourth and twelfth years 
(Thucyd. 1. 5); and by three eclipses of the sun and one of the moon, men- 
tioned by Thucydides and Xenophon. Now, Thucydides, an unquestion- 
able witness, tells us that the news of the death of Artaxerxes Longimanus 
was brought to Ephesus, and from thence by some Athenians to Athens, 
in the seventh year of the Peloponnesian war, when the winter half-year 
was running, and therefore he died An. 4, Olymp. 88, in the end of An. 
j. P. 4289 (B.C. 425), suppose a month, or two, before mid- winter; for so 
long the news would be in coming, Now, Artaxerxes Longimanus reigned 
forty years, by the consent of Diodorus, Eusebius, Jerome, Sulpitius, or 
forty-one, according to Ptol. in Can., Clem. Alexand. (1. 1), Strom., Chron, 
klexandr. , Abulpharagius, Nicephorus, including therein the reign of his 
successors, Xerxes and Sogdian, as Abulpharagius informs us. After Ar- 
taxerxes, reigned his son, Xerxes, two months, and Sogdian seven months ; 
but their reign is no 1 ' reckoned apart in summing up the years of the kings, 
but is included in the forty, or forty-one, years reign of Artaxerxes ; omit 
these nine months, and the precise reign of Artaxerxes will be thirty -nine 
years and three months. And, therefore, since his reign ended in the 
beginning of winter, An. J.P. 4289 (B.C. 425) it began between midsummer 
and autumn An. j.p. 4250 (b.c. 464). 



APPENDIX. 515 



"The same thing I gather also thus. Cambyses began his reign in 
spring, An. j.p. 4185 (B.C. 529), and reigned eight years, including the 
five months of Smerdes ; and then Darius Hystaspis began in spring, An. 
J.P. 4193 (B.C. 521), and reigned thirty-six years, by the unanimous con- 
sent of all chronologers. The reigns of these two kings are deter7nined by 
three eclipses of the moon, observed at Babylon, and recorded by Ptolemy ; 
so that it cannot be disputed. One was in the seventh year of Cambyses, 
An. J.P. 4191 (B.C. 523), July 16th, at eleven at night ; another in the 
twentieth year of Darius, An. J.P. 4212 (B.C. 502), Nov. 19th, at II. 45 at 
night; a third in the thirty-first year of Darius, An. J.P. 4223 (B.C. 491), 
April 25th, at 11.30 at night. By these eclipses, and the prophecies of 
Haggai and Zechary compared together, it is manifest that his years began 
after the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh Jewish month, and before the 
25th day of April, and by consequence about March. Xerxes, therefore, 
began in spring, An. J.P. 4229 (B.C. 485), for Darius died in the fifth year 
after the battle of Marathon, as Herodotus (lib. 7) and Plutarch mention ; 
and that battle was in October, An. J.P. 4224 (b.c. 490), ten years before 
the battle at Salamis. Xerxes, therefore, began within less than a year 
after October, An. J.P. 4228 (B.C. 486), suppose in the spring following, 
for he spent his first five years, and something more, in preparations for his 
expedition against the Greeks ; and this expedition was in the time of the 
Olympic games, An. I, Olymp. 75, Calliade Athenis Archonte, twenty- 
eight years after the regifuge and consulship of the first Consul, Junius 
Brutus, Anno Urbis Conditse 273 (B.C. 481), Fabio and Furio Coss. The 
passage of Xerxes' army over the Hellespont began in the end of the 
fourth year of the seventy-fourth Olympiad, that is, in June, An. j.p. 4234 
(B.C. 480), and took up one month; and in autumn, three months after, on 
the full moon, the 16th day of the month Munychion, was the battle of 
Salamis, and a little after that an eclipse of the sun, which, by the calcula- 
tion, fell on October 2nd. Flis sixth year, therefore, began a little before 
June, suppose in spring, An. J.P. 4234 (B.C. 480), and his first year conse- 
quently in spring, An. j.p. 4229 (B.C. 485), as above. Now, he reigned 
almost twenty-one years, by the consent of all writers. Add the seven 
months of Artabanus, and the sum will be twenty-one years and about 
four or five months, which end between midsummer and autumn, An. j.p. 
4250 (b.c. 464). At this time, therefore, began the reign of his successor, 
Artaxerxes, as was to be proved. 

"The same thing is also confirmed by Julius Africanus, who informs us 
out of former writers that the twentieth year of this Artaxerxes was the 
115th year from the beginning of the reign of Cyrus in Persia, and fell in 
with An. 4, Olymp. 83. It began, therefore, with the Olympic year soon 
after the summer solstice, An. j.p. 4269 (b.c. 445). Subduct nineteen 
years, and his first year will begin at the same time of the year, An. J. p. 
4250 (B.C. 464), as above. 



516 APPENDIX. 



" His seventh year, therefore, began after midsummer, 

AN. J.P. 4256 (B.C. 458), AND THE JOURNEY OF EZRA TO JERUSALEM, 
IN THE SPRING FOLLOWING, FELL ON THE BEGINNING OF AN. J.P. 
4257 (B.C. 457) AS ABOVE." 

(2) On the three eclipses in the reigns of Cambyses and 
Darius, by means of which Sir Isaac Newton determines the 
date of the seventh year of Artaxerxes (the starting point of 
the " seventy weeks,") we cite the testimony of Ptolemy, by 
whom " a foundation has been laid for chronology sure as the 
stars." Ptolemy's account of ancient eclipses, and of their 
connection with historic facts, is more precious than gold, and 
warrants a translation of the Almagest into every language. 
The astronomer Laplace says of this work, " E Almagest, consi- 
de're comme le depot des anciennes observations, est un des 
plus precieux monuments de Tantiquite." 

i. Of the eclipse in the seventh year of Cambyses (b.c. 523), 
Ptolemy mentions : 

4 ' In the seventh year of Cambyses, which is the 225th year of Nabonas- 
sar, between the 17th and 18th of Phamenoth, at one hour before midnight, 
the moon was eclipsed at Babylon by half the diameter on the north. At 
Alexandria the eclipse must thus have been nearly ih. 50m. before mid- 
night." 

The era of Nabonassar (in whose 225th year this eclipse 
took place) is one fixed with certainty by recorded eclipses to 
Feb. 26th, 747 B.C. The month of Phamenoth is the seventh 
in the Egyptian year, and the time of this eclipse was July 16th, 
at n at night, b.c. 523. 

ii. The eclipse in the twentieth year of Darius is thus 
described by Ptolemy : 

' ' The second eclipse, which also Hipparchus employed, was in the 
twentieth year of the Darius who was after Cambyses, in the Egyptian 
month Epiphi 28 to 29, at 6J equinoxial hours of the night, at which time 
the moon was likewise eclipsed on the south by one-fourth of her diameter, 
and the middle time at Babylon was two-fifths of an equinoxial hour before 
midnight, since half the night was then 6| equinoxial hours nearly, but 
in Alexandria it was l| equinoxial hours before midnight. " 



APPENDIX. 517 



Epiphi was the eleventh Egyptian month. The time of the 
eclipse was Nov. 19th, nh. 45m. at night, B.C. 502. 

iii. With reference to the eclipse in the thirty-first year of 
Darius, Ptolemy writes as follows : — 

" For the purpose of determining the node, we have taken the first 
eclipse observed at Babylon in the thirty-first year of Darius I. in the 
Egyptian month Tybi, third to fourth day, in the middle of the sixth hour, 
in which it is declared that the moon was eclipsed two digits on the south. 
With this we have compared another observed at Alexandria in the eighth 
year of Adrian," etc. 

The month Tybi was the fifth in the Egyptian year, and the 
date of the eclipse, as given by Sir Isaac Newton, is April 25th, 
nh. 30m. at night, An. j.p. 4223, which is B.C. 491. (The 
An. j.p., or year of the Julian period, is not reckoned from 
the creation, or from any historic date, but is a valuable arti- 
ficial combination of several cycles in astronomical and chro- 
nological use.) 

For commentary on these eclipses see the Chrono- Astrolabe 
by James Bowman Lindsay, pp. 75, 80-82 ; from which we 
have taken Ptolemy's statements as above given. 

Having thus shown that the point from which the " seventy 
weeks " are reckoned — the going forth of the edict of Arta- 
xerxes to restore the Jewish polity, in the seventh year of his 
reign — is the spring (passover month) of B.C. 457, we have now 
to establish, both by historical and astronomical means, as ap- 
proximately as possible, the dates of the nativity, and of the 
death and resurrection of our Lord. 

(3) As TO THE PARTICULAR HISTORIC INTERVAL OCCUPIED 

by our Lord's life, the following passage from Mr. Lindsay's 
valuable work, the Chrono- Astrolabe, presents the facts with 
great force and clearness : — 

1 ' Christianity exists now, and we know from Greek, Roman, and Jewish 
history that there was a time when it was not. The Jews were strictly for- 
bidden to hold intercourse with foreigners ; but, notwithstanding their ex- 
clusiveness, the Gentile writers often mention them. The founder of Chris* 



5i8 APPENDIX. 



tianity, at what time soever He lived, gave His followers a law the very 
reverse of exclusiveness, by going to all nations to make known His doc- 
trines. Not a word about Christianity is mentioned by Caesar, Cicero, 
Livy, Virgil, or Ovid, and to believe that it existed without being men- 
tioned by them is preposterous credulity. A century after these writers, 
Christians are mentioned by Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny, and Suetonius, and 
the advent of their Master must have been in the interval. Four different 
accounts of the life and death of Christ are given ; the difference of author- 
ship is proved by apparent discrepancies, and the truthfulness is confirmed 
by the general harmony. Luke relates several dates with great minuteness, 
and this affords a strong argument of veracity. He says that John com- 
menced his preaching in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, and that soon after 
Jesus also commenced, when He was about thirty years of age. He also 
says that Christ was born in the reign of Augustus, and both he and Matthew 
place this event a little before the death of Herod. Now, from Ptolemy's 
canon we know exactly the times of Augustus and Tiberius, and the time 
of the death of Herod is determined from Josephus. The time thus ob- 
tained for the origin of Christianity is just the interval of those Roman 
writers ivho do not mention it and those ivho do, and there is no other time 
possible that can be fixed upon for its origin. False religions may arise 
from small beginnings as well as true ; the utmost care and caution are 
necessaiy to discriminate, and credulity is as culpable as scepticism. A 
remarkable dissimilarity is observed in the teaching of the founder of Is- 
lamism and of the Founder of Christianity. The former affirmed that he 
had interviews with heaven, and, without giving any proof of the truth of 
his assertion, condemned all who disbelieved him to future punishment. 
The latter never found fault with the Jews for disbelieving His word, but 
for denying the evidence of their senses, or attributing His gracious miracles 
to demons. The Jews were trained from infancy to entertain the highest 
respect for the laws of Moses, and the most thorough contempt for all other 
religions. That a handful of persons thus trained should spontaneously 
arise and denounce those laws that they were taught to venerate is contrary 
to experience. No such example in the annals of history is anywhere found, 
and its occurrence would be as great a miracle as any in the Bible. No 
cause conceivable could effect such a change, except miracles addressed to 
the senses, or a direct voice from heaven ; and those who deny those 
miracles as being contrary to experience, are compelled to admit a still 
greater miracle. Christianity certainly had an origin, and no other than 
that assigned to it would consist with experience. The books of the New 
Testament, also, can be proved to have been written in the first century, 
and not long after the events recorded in them. They could not have been 
written in the century before, for the events recorded did not tJien exist, 
neither could they have been written in the centuiy after, for they are quoted 



APPENDIX. 519 



and commented upon by a host of writers that then lived. The writers ot 
the second century are quoted by those of the third ; and thus a regular 
chain of writers, that has never been broken, never will, never can be 
broken, has been formed from the apostles to the present day." — Chrono* 
Astrolabe, Lindsay, p. 142. 



(4) The Date of the Nativity. ^ 

Our present era for the nativity, or that in popular use, is 
not of apostolic, or even of early, origin. It is that which was 
fixed upon by Dionysius Exiguus, in the sixth century, and is 
proved to be erroneous by the fact that it places the birth of 
Christ no less than four years after the death of Herod — of 
the Herod who, when our Lord was born, sought " the young 
child to destroy him." 

Our Lord was certainly born before the death of Herod, 
and the time of Herod's death is ascertained by means of an 
eclipse of the moon recorded by Josephus (Antiq. xvii. 4). 
Just before his death Herod burnt alive, along with his com- 
panions, one Matthias, who had been made high priest, — 
u And that very night" says Josephus, " there was an eclipse of 
the moon." The passover occurred immediately after the 
death of Herod, and before this came the funeral feast of 
some days duration, which Archelaus appointed in honour of 
his father. " Such an eclipse of the moon, visible at Jeru- 
salem, as Ideler and Wurm have proved, actually occurred at 
that time, in the night between the 12th and 13th of March, 
and according to Ideler beginning at ih. 48m., and ending 
at 4I1. 12m. The full moon of Nisan, i.e., the 15th day of 
Nisan, occurred in 750 a.u.c. (b.c. 4) on the 12th of April. 
If, therefore, as we have seen above, Herod died some days 
before this, and consequently at the beginning of April, this 
note of time would harmonize most excellently with the date 
of the eclipse of the moon." 

" Wurm, considering that an astronomical datum furnished 
a basis superior to all doubt, undertook the praiseworthy 
labour of calculating all the lunar eclipses frotn 6 B.C. to 1 B.C., 



520 APPENDIX. 



and has tabulated the results. He shows that in the year 
u.c. 750 (b.c. 4) the only lunar eclipse visible at Jerusalem was 
that already mentioned, and that in the only other year which 
can enter into consideration for the year of Herod's death, 
there was not one." — Wieseler's " Chronological Synopsis of 
the Four Gospels,'' p. 51. 

(5) Kepler's Calculations as to the Star of the 

Nativity. 

''The credit of having been f the first to employ the data derived from 
astronomical and chronological calculations respecting this star, as the basis 
of his investigations concerning the year of our Lord's birth, is due to the 
celebrated astronomer Kepler. At the close of 1603, the very time that a 
violent controversy was raging among theologians as to the year of our 
Lord's birth, a phenomenon appeared in the starry heavens, which drew this 
celebrated astronomer into the ranks of the combatants. On the ijth op 
December of that year, there occurred a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and 
Saturn. In the spring of 1604, Mars also came to the same place, and in 
the autumn an entirely new body, resembling a fixed star, appeared in the 
neighbourhood of those two planets at the east part of Serpentarius, 
shining at first like a star of the first magnitude and very bright, but be- 
coming gradually dimmer, until in October, 1605, it was scarcely visible, 
and at last, in March, 1606, had totally disappeared. Kepler, well aware 
that the astrologers of all times, and therefore certainly also the Magi men- 
tioned by Matthew, attached great importance to the conjunction of Jupiter 
and Saturn, which recurs about every twenty years, and knowing that for 
that very reason they had divided the zodiac, which it traverses in about 800 
Years, into four trigons, he calculated whether such a conjunction had taken 
place shortly before the commencement of the era at which, according to 
historical data, the birth of our Lord must be placed. He arrived at the 
remarkable result that this conjttnction had happened three times in 747 u.c, 
B.C. 7, and that in the last half of Pisces, near the first point of Aries, 
while in the spring of the following year the planet Mars also came to the 
same spot. He therefore argued, that the star seen by the Magi from the east, 
at the birth of Christ, was identical with the conjunction of those three 
superior planets, and that probably an extraordinary star, like that which 
had blazed forth in the foot of Serpentarius in his own time, was added to the 
group. Accordingly he placed the birth of Jesus in the year 

748 A.U.C, B.C. 6. 

" Ideler, pursuing Kepler's view still further, has given us two calcu- 
lations of the conjunction of the two planets. The later, and, in Encke's 



APPENDIX. 521 



opinion, the most, accurate, furnishes us with the following data to deter- 
mine the three planetary conjunctions. The first took place on the 29th 
of May, in 21° of Pisces, when the planets were visible in the East before 
sunrise, and Jupiter and Saturn were only one degree apart ; the second, 
on the 1st of October, in 18 of Pisces ; and the third, on the 5th of 
December, in 16 of Pisces. Ideler, therefore, as had been previously 
done by Sanclemonti on other grounds, which Ideler accepts as valid, 
places the birth of Christ in 747 a.u.c." — Wieseler's " Synopsis of the Four 
Gospels," pp. 56-8. 

The following passage on this remarkable conjunction at 
the time of the nativity is from Dean Alford's Commentary 
on the New Testament : — 

" The expression of the Magi, 'we have seen his star,' does not seem to 
point to any miraculous appearance, but to something observed in the 
course of their watching in the heavens. We know the Magi to have been 
devoted to astrology, and, on comparing the language of our text with this 
undoubted fact, / confess that it appears to me the most ingenuous way 
fairly to take account of that fact in our exegesis, and not to shelter our- 
selves from an apparent difficulty by the convenient, but forced, hypothesis 
of a miracle. . . . Now, we learn from astronomical calculations that 
a remarkable conjunction of the planets of our system took place a short 
time before the birth of our Lord ; . . . these statements have been 
remarkably confirmed, except in the detail now corrected, ' that an ordinary 
eye would regard them (the planets) as one star of surpassing brightness,' 
by the Rev. C. Pritchard, in a paper read by him before the Royal 
Astronomical Society, containing his calculations of the times and near- 
nesses of the conjunctions, as verified by the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich. 
In the year of Rome 747, on the 20th May (29th, Pritchard) there was a 
conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the twentieth degree of constellation 
Pisces, close to the first point of Aries, which was the part of the heavens 
noted in astrological science as that in which the signs denoted the greatest 
and most noble events. On the 27th October (29th Sept., Pritchard), in 
the same year, another conjunction of the same planets took place in the 
sixteenth degree of Pisces ; and on the 12th November (5th Dec, 
Pritchard) a third, in the fifteenth degree of the same sign (Ideler, ' Hand. 
buch der Chronologie, ' ii. 399). . . . It is fair to notice the influence 
on the position maintained in this note of the fact, which Mr. Pritchard 
seems to have substantiated, that the planets did not, during the year 
B.C. 7, approach each other so as to be mistaken by any eye for one star : 
indeed not 'within double the apparent diameter of the moon.' I submit, 
that even if this were so, the inference of the note remains as it was. The 
conjunction of the two planets, complete or incomplete, would be that 



;22 APPENDIX. 



■which would bear 1 significance, not their looking like or i 

— Afford, Comm. on Matt. ii. 

With all due deference to Dean Alford as an able and 
candid critic, we do not think that any of these conjunctions 
can be referred to in the words, u Lo 3 the star which they saw 
in tlie east went before them, till it came and stood over where tlie 
you?ig child was" We think it not improbable that there was 
a coincidence of the appearance of some bright particular 
star with the earliest of these conjunctions on the year which 
preceded that of the nativity, judging from the fact that 
after Herod had "privily called the wise men and inquired 
of them diligently what time the star appeared," he "sent 
forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in 
all the coasts thereof, from two years old a?id wider, according 
to tlie time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men" — 
a fact which implies that the first appearance of the star was 
within two years of the slaughter in Bethlehem, which followed 
the nativity. It seems to us that the star which, reappearing to 
the wise men, " went before them and stood over where the young 
child was" must have been something very different from the 
mere proximity of two distinct planets revolving in common 
with the rest of the stellar heavens in a westerly direction. 

(6) Luke's Date for the Ministry of John. 

The evangelist Luke connects the ministry and baptism of 
John with the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Csesar 
(Luke iii. i). 

" The fifteenth year :: the solepri id} v :; 7:': e::us, began August 19th, 
V.C 781 (a.d. 28) and reckoning backwards thirty years from that time 
(see ver. 25 . we should have the birth of our Lord in u.c. 751, or about 
then ; for <b<rei rpidK. will admit of some latitude. But Herod the Great 
died in the beginning of the year 750 (B.C. 4), and our Lord's birtb must 
be fixed some months, at least, before the death of Herod. If, then, it be 
placed in 749 He would have been, at least, thirty-two at the time of his 
baptism, seeing that it took place some time after the beginning of John's 
ministry. This difficulty has led to the supposition that this fifteenth year 
is not to be dated from the sole but from the associated principate of 



APPENDIX. 523 



Tiberius, which commenced most probably at the end of U.C. 764 (a.d. i i). 
According to this the fifteenth of Tiberius will begin at the end of u.C. 779." 
— Alford, on Luke iii. 



(7) The Date of our Lord's Passion. 

We have already cited testimony (p. 45 1) to show that the 
ministry of our Lord included four passovers, and lasted for 
three and a half years. 

His passion is placed in the year a.d. 29, — 

" By many authors, by Lactantius, Augustine, Sulpicius, Idatius, Fast. 
apud Noris, the Catalogue Pont. Rom. apud Bucherium, by Origen, 
Hieronymus, and Tertullian. It is most probable that the nativity was in 
B.C. 5, that the ministry extended to a fourth passover, and that the 
crucifixion and ascension were in a.d. 29" {Clinton, Epitomy of Chron. 
of Rome, p. 7). Among modern chronologists this date is accepted by 
Benson, Brown, Mann, Ideler, Bianchini, Sanclemonti, etc. "If the first 
passover after the baptism was in the spring of A. D. 26, the crucifixion and 
the fourth passover are determined to the year 29 ; and it remains to 
inquire whether the passover of that year was in March or April. The 
full moon of March is fixed by Mr. Cuninghame's calculation to Friday, 
March 18th, at 9I1. 16m. p.m. If that was the paschal moon, we obtain 
these dates : — the 14th of Nisan began at 6 p.m. of March 17th, and the 
15th of Nisan at 6 p.m. Mafch 18th, 3I1. 16m. before the full moon; and 
the paschal lamb was slain at 3 p.m. of Friday, March iSth, 6h. 16m. 
before the full moon. It is no insurmountable objection that this was three 
days before the equinox ; for we have seen from the preceding testimonies 
that a Jewish passover was sometimes celebrated before the equinox ; and, 
as Mr. Benson properly remarks, in the Mosaic law there is no injunction 
which refers to the equinox at all. It has been objected, however, that 
March 18th is inadmissible, because if the 1 6th of Nisan is at March 20th, 
the corn would not be ripe for an offering. But the law seems only to 
require that when the sheaf was offered on the 16th of Nisan the barley 
should be in the ear. That it could be ripe enough to be reaped, and used 
for food, at that early season is scarcely credible. If the passover had been 
delayed until ripeness in the latter sense had been attained, not only a full 
moon at the equinox would have been excluded, but many vernal full 
moons after the equinox, and it could rarely happen that the passover could 
be celebrated at a full moon at all " ( Clinton, Epitomy Chron. Pome, 
p. 326). The full moon of April, a.d. 29, fell on Sunday, the 17th, 
and if this was the month, the paschal lamb was slain at 3 p.m. of Friday, 
April 15th, one day nineteen hours before the full moon ; an irregularity and 



524 APPENDIX. 



want of adaptation to the lunar revolutions measuring the feasts, which 
nothing short of absolute demonstration should compel us to admit in such 
a case. The conclusion is that the day of that supreme passover was 
according to the normal Levitical arrangement that of full moon, March 
1 8th, a.d. 29, and that the resurrection immediately preceded the vernal 
equinox. 

(8) Conclusions as to the Dates in the "seventy 
weeks " of our lord's death, resurrection, and ascen- 
SION. 

(a) We showed that the 490 years are to be reckoned from 
the beginning of Ezra's journey to Jerusalem, or " the first day 
of the first month," that of passover, in the year 457 B.C. 

(J?) We concluded that our Lord's death took place on the 
day of passover, Friday, March 18, a.d. 29. His resurrection 
followed two days later (Sunday), and his ascension forty days 
subsequently (the forty days apparently included the day on 
which He rose). 

(c) The interval in solar years between these dates is 485 
years, and 485 solar years equal 6000 lunations, less 41-42 
days. Therefore reckoning from the spring of B.C. 457, when 
Ezra set out on his journey, 485 solar years, terminating with 
our Lord's death, together with the 41-2 days to his ascension, 
equalled 6000 lunations. 

id) The interval measured by months. Ezra began his 
journey on the first day of the passover month. Our Lord's 
death was on the 14th day of a passover month, and his ascen- 
sion near the end of the following month. 

Now, by the most exact calculation (given in the Tables in 
the fourth edition of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica ") the 
new moon of the passover month, b.c 458, fell on March 31 
(or April 6, o.s.). 

From April 6, B.C. 458, to April 1, a.d. 29, are 486 
equinoxial years. Now 486 years are one day less than 601 1 
lunations; therefore from April 6, b.c. 458, to April 2, 
a.d. 29, were 601 1 lunations. To this add the lunation which 
followed, near whose end the ascension took place* and the sum 



APPENDIX. 525 



is 6012 lunations. But B.C. 458 was, as Sir Isaac Newton has 
shown, the year which preceded Ezra's journey; therefore sub- 
tract for the Jewish lunar year 458-7 twelve lunations, and 
there remain, from the passover month B.C. 457 to the month 
which terminated with the ascension, 6000 lunations. 

It follows from this that there exists a perfect chronological 
analogy between the date in the 49 years jubilee of typical 
atonement and liberty, and the date in the 490 years of the 
accomplishment of true atonement, ending with the glorious 
ascension of the great High Priest into heaven itself, there tG 
appear in the presence of God for us, having obtained eternal 
redemption. 

In the 49 years, exactly 600 lunations to a day terminated 
with the one \ in the 490 years, 6000 lunations terminated with 
the other. 

How wonderfully does Jesus of Nazareth' fulfil the Divine 
Old Testament prophecies of redemption ! His death was on 
the very day of passover ; his resurrection on the day of the 
presentation of the wave sheaf nrstfruits of the early harvest ; 
the coming of his Spirit was on the day of Pentecost ; and his 
glorious ascension was accomplished at the close of that month 
whose end in the " seventy weeks " exactly answers to the 
position of the day of jubilee, and of the High Priest's entering 
within the veil, in the glad and beautiful Levitical symbol. 

VH. THE DURATION OF OUR LORD'S TERRESTRIAL LIFE, AND 
ITS AGREEMENT WITH THE 33 YEARS, 7 MONTHS, AND 7 
DAYS SOLI-LUNAR CYCLE, THE CYCLE IN WHICH THE SUN 
GAINS ON THE MOON ONE SOLAR YEAR. 

We have now cleared the way for a more accurate study of 
the duration of our Lord's life on earth. We have shown that 
his birth took place before B.C. 4, according to calculations of 
the eclipse which preceded Herod's death, and also that our 
Lord's death was accomplished in the year a.d. 29, on the day 
of passover, and that his ascension followed 41-42 days later. 

We must now briefly consider the grounds of the popular 



526 APPENDIX. 

view that the nativity took place in the month of December, 
and endeavour to ascertain as nearly as possible the true date 
of the nativity. 

"The vulgar day OF our LordNs nativity, Dec. 25, though an early 
tradition, as appears trom the Apostolical Constitutions, lib. 5, cap. 13, was 
not established till the time of the Emperor Constantine, who died a.d. 
337, when it was enacted, probably about the Council of Nice, a.d. 325, by 
the Roman Church, and adopted by the Greek Church ten years after at 
Constantinople, according to Chrysostom in his homily on the day of the 
nativity." "The true cause of their fixing on the 25th of December is thus 
perhaps best explained by Sir Isaac Newton." 

" The times of the birth and passion of Christ being not material to 
religion, were little regarded by the Christians of the first age. They who 
began first to celebrate them placed them in the cardinal periods of the year; 
as the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary on the 25^/z of March, which when 
Julius Csesar corrected the calender was the vernal equinox; the feast of 
John Baptist on the 24^ June, which was the summer solstice; the feast of 
St. Michael on Sep. 29, which was the autumn equinox; and the birth 
of Christ on the winter solstice, Dec 25, with the feasts of 
St. Stephen, St. John, and the Innocents, as near as they could place 
them. And because the solstice in time removed from the 25th Dec. to the 
24th, the 23rd, the 22nd, and so on backwards, hence some in the follow- 
ing centuries placed the birth of Christ on Dec. 23, and at length on 
Dec. 20, and for the same reason they seem to have set the feast of St. 
Thomas on December 21, and that of St. Matthew on Sept. 21. So 
also at the entrance of the sun into all the signs in the Julian Calendar, 
they placed the days of other saints ; as the Conversion of Paul on Jan. 
25, when the sun entered &j ; St. Matthias on Feb. 25, when he 
entered ^ ; St. Mark on April 25, when he entered Q ; Corpus Christi 
on May 26, when he entered H; St. James on July 25, when he 
entered s; St. Bartholomew on Aug. 24, when he entered VtV ; SS. Simon 
and Jude on Oct. 28, when he entered TT\ '■> an( l if there were any other 
remarkable days in the Julian Calendar, they placed the saints upon them, 
as St. Barnabas on June II, where Ovid seems to place the feast of Vesta 
and Fortuna, and the goddess Matuta ; and SS. Philip and James on the 
first of May, a day dedicated both to the Bona Dea, or Magna Mater, and 
to the goddess Flora, and still celebrated with her rites. All which shows 
that these dates were fixed in the first Christian calendars by mathematicians 
at pleasure, without any ground in tradition ; and that the Christians after' 
wards took tip with what they found in the calendars" — Sir I. Newton on 
Daniel, p. 145. 

" Hospinian, a learned German antiquary, is of opinion that the Christians 



APPENDIX. 52; 



at Pome did not celebrate the 25th of December as thinking Christ was 
then born, but to make amends for the heathen Saturnalia ; which was a 
season of great festivity, beginning on Dec. 16, and lasting three days, 
but usually prolonged to the end of the week on account of the succeeding 
feast of the Sigillarii (Macrob. Saturnal., lib. 1, cap. 10), and indeed the 
crowding together so many holidays near the end of December, as we find 
in the calendar, strongly confirms this opinion. 

" To determine the true day of Christ's birth, as Scaliger says, belongs to 
God alone, not man. Of all the various conjectures that have been pro- 
posed, the most probable are, either (1) that 'Christ our Passover' was 
bom about the time of the vernal equinox, when the passover was cele- 
brated ; or (2) ABOUT THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX AT THE CELEBRATION 

OF the feast of tabernacles, when ' the WORD became flesh and 
(itTK^vcoaev) tabernacled among us ' (John i. 14) ; or (3) on the great day 
of Atonement, the tenth day of the seventh month, as ' a faithful high priest 
in things pertaining to God, to make atonement for the sins of the people ' 
(Heb. ii. 17), to be Himself 'a propitiation for our sins, and not for ours 
only, but also for those of the whole world' (1 John ii. 2). And if this 
last (adopted by Primate Usher) be preferred, it gives a peculiar emphasis 
to the declaration of the angel to the shepherds on the night of the nativity : 
* Fear not : for, lo ! I bring you glad tidings of great joy, which shall be 
unto all people ; for unto you is born this day a Saviour, who is Christ the 
Lord. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards 
men ' (Luke ii. 10-14). And indeed either of the last tzuo epochs agrees 
better than -the first with the prevailing traditions of the duration of the 
ministry of Christ.'''' — Hales' Chron. v. I, p. 199. 

The coincidence of our Lord's death with the passover, and 
of His resurrection with the wave sheaf offering, suggests the 
probability of the coincidence of his birth with some one of the 
feasts of the law. 

That his birth should have coincided with the fiassovc? is 
not only most' unlikely, if not inadmissible, from a chronolo- 
gical point of view, but also on the grounds (1) that it makes 
two so different events coincide with anniversaries of the same 
typical feast, and (2) that our Lord's birth had not the sacrifi- 
cial character which belonged to his death, and which justified 
the coincidence of the latter with the slaying of the paschal 
lamb. 

On the same ground the day of Atonement is also excluded ; 
the birth of Christ was not an atonement for sin, neither did He 



523 APPENDIX. 



enter on the day of his birth " within the veil," as the high 
priest did on the atoning day. 

There remains then the probability, on typical and moral 
grounds, that the nativity coincided with the feast of tabernacles, 
that most joyous feast which celebrated the dwelling of Israel 
in booths, when God brought them out of the land of Egypt, a 
coincidence in perfect harmony with Jehovatis tabernacWtg 
amongst us when He became incarnate ("the word became flesh 
and tabernacled among us ") to bring us out of the antitypical 
Egypt in order that we may dwell with Him in the place He is 
preparing for us. This strong probability is confirmed by the 
age of our Lord at his baptism, and the three and a half years 
duration of his ministry, for as his death was on the day of 
Passover in spring, his birth, if thirty-three and a half years 
previously, took place at the opposite season of the year, near the 
autumnal equinox, and about the time of the feast of taber- 
nacles. 

It becomes then a matter of much interest to ascertain what 
the exact interval was which extended from the day of our 
Lord's ascension back to the commencement of the feast of 
tabernacles in the thirty-fourth preceding year. 

To render the calculation as simple as possible, we will show, 
first, the interval from the feast of tabernacles B.C. 6, to that 
of tabernacles in a.d. 29, and then subtract the difference be- 
tween the date of the ascension and that of this latter feast 
of tabernacles. 

(1) From tabernacles to tabernacles equals a number of com- 
plete lunations, for the feast was regulated by lunations. 

(2) From the feast of tabernacles, B.C. 6, to that of taber- 
nacles a.d. 29, extends 34 years, and in 34 years there are 
twelve complete months of epact; the months to be intercalated, 
therefore, are twelve. 

(3) Thirty-four lunar years are 40S months, which with 
twelve months intercalation are 420 months. 

(4) The feast of passover was on the 14th day of the first 
month, and the feast of tabernacles commenced on the 15th 



APPENDIX. 529 



day of the seventh, and therefore six months and one day 
later; we must, therefore, subtract six months from 420, 
leaving 414, and also subtract one, day. We have then to add 
41-42 days to the result to obtain the distance to the day of 
ascension. 



414 months contain . . 
Subtract one day . , . 


. . i2,225d. 15I1. 
id. 


Add 2d. and 4od. . . . 


I2,224d. I5I1. 

. . 42d. 




i2,266d. 15I1. 



We now compare this period of 12,266-7 days with the soli- 
lunar cycle in which the sun gains on the moon one solar year. 

That cycle occupies exactly 33 '585V.; or 33 solar years, 
seven months, and seven days. 

We inquire what this period is in days. 

Thirty-three solar years are a cycle of the day and year, and 
contain 12,053 days within ten minutes. 



33 solar years contain . . . 

7 lunations 

7 days , 


. 12,053d. 

2o6d. 

. . 7 d. 


17I1. 


Measure of the cycle . . 


. . i2,266d. 


17I1. 



We previously concluded that as our Lord was thirty years 
old at his baptism, and as his ministry lasted for three and a 
half years, and terminated with a passover, He must have been 
born about the time of the feast of tabernacles, and now we 
find that the interval from the commencement of the feast of 
tabernacles B.C. 6, to the day of our Lord's ascension, or 
12,266-76.., was a soli-lunar cycle, in which the sun gained o?i 
the moon exactly one solar year. 

This is the cycle which we consider to be the unit, or day, 

M M 



530 



APPENDIX. 



in the measurement of redemption history, and which we have 
named the Messianic Cycle. 



VIII. CONFIRMATION OF THE CHRONOLOGY THUS UNFOLDED. 

i. As to the date of the first of Nisan, B.C. 457. 2300 years 
is a soli-lunar cycle ; therefore the sun and moon occupy the 
same position at its beginning and end. From B.C. 457 to 
a.d. 1844 is 2300 years; and the new moon in March, 1844, 
occurred on the i9-20th (March i9d. 2I1. 39m. astron. time 
of new moon at Jerusalem). The fihasis occurred, of course, 
later, and stands in the modern Jewish calendar for that date on 
March 21st. This confirms the date March i9~2oth for new 
moon of first Nisan, b.c. 457. 

2. Reckoning the "seventy weeks" from b.c. 457, "the 
seventy weeks of years are Jewish weeks ending with sabbatical 
years, which is very remarkable." (Sir I. Newton.) 



Table of Sabbatic Years in the "Seventy Weeks." 


Wks. 


ISt 


W 


2nd 


w 


3rd 


w 


4th 


W 


5th 


w 


6th | w 


7 th 




7oyrs. 




70 yrs. 




70 yrs. 
B.C. 




70 yrs. 




70 yrs. 




70 7rs. 


70 yrs. 




B.C. 




B.C. 




B.C. 




B.C. 




B.C. 




B.C. 


I 


457 


11 


3*7 


21 


317 


31 


247 


41 


177 


51 


I07 


61 


37 


2 


450 


12 


380 


22 


3IO 


32 


24O 


42 


I70 


52 


100 


62 


30 


3 


443 


13 


373 


23 


303 


33 


233 


43 


163 


53 


93 


63 


23 


4 


436 


14 


366 


24 


296 


34 


226 


44 


I 5 6 


54 


86 


64 


16 


5 


429 


15 


359 


25 


289 


35 


219 


45 


I49 


55 


79 


65 


9 


6 


422 


16 


352 


26 


282 


36 


212 


46 


142 


56 


72 


66 


2 


7 


415 


17 


345 


27 


275 


37 


205 


47 


135 


57 


65 


67 


A.D. 6 


8 


408 


18 


33* 


28 


268 


3* 


I98 


48 


128 


5* 


5* 


68 


13 


9 


401 


19 


33i 


29 


26l 


39 


191 


49 


121 


59 


5i 


69 


20 


10 


394 


20 


324 


30 


254 


40 


184 


50 


114 


60 


44 


70 


I 34. 



It is needful to guard against the mistake that the sabbatic 
year exactly coincided with the interval, January to December, 
in any of the years in the above table. In each case it in- 
cluded parts of two years. The years on which it fell seem 
to have been 458-7 b.c, and so on to a.d. 33-34. The series 



APPENDIX. 53T 

is confirmed by the repeated statements of Josephus, that the 
capture of Jerusalem by Herod and Sosius, which took place 
at the end of B.C. 38, and the beginning of 37 (see Clinton, 
" F. Hellenici ,; ), occurred in a sabbatical year. 

There is some difficulty in adjusting its exact position, for in 
Ant. xiv. 16. 2 it is spoken of as current at the time of the 
siege : the Jews " erected new works when the former were 
ruined," etc., "and this they did while a mighty army lay 
round about them, and while they were distressed by famine 
and the want of necessaries, for this happened to be a sabbatic 
year " ; and in Ant. xv. 1. 2 it is current after the capture, for 
then the distress was aggravated " by the sabbatic year, which 
was still going on, and forced the country to lie still unculti- 
vated, since we are forbidden to sow our land that year." 

It should be noticed that while the law commanded that the 
year of jubilee should commence on the day of atonement in 
the seventh month, it gave no such command with respect to 
the commencement of the sabbatic year. The traditions of 
the Talmud (Rosh Hashana) assign its beginning to the month 
Tisri. A tradition preserved by Maimonides informs us that 
" only Sh'mittahs were kept, and no Jobel, after the return 
from Babylon." 

The Roman historian Tacitus testifies to the observance of 
the sabbatical year by the Jews in his time : "they give the 
seventh day to ease, because it put an end to labour ; more- 
over, through the allurements of idleness, the seventh year also 
is given to inactivity " (Tac. Hist. v. 4). 

Compare also the very important testimony of Caesar's 
decrees, recorded by Josephus, Ant. xiv. 10. 6 : 

"Caius Caesar, imperator the second time, hath, ordained that all the 
country of the Jews, excepting Joppa, do pay a tribute yearly for the city 
of Jerusalem, excepting the seventh, which they call the sabbatical year, 
because thereon they neither receive the fruits of their trees, nor do they sow 
their land ; and that they pay their tribute in Sidon on the second year 
(of that sabbatical period) the fourth part of what was sown ; and, besides 
this, they are to pay the same tythes to Hyrcanus and his sons, which they 
paid to their forefathers. And that no one, neither president, nor lieu- 



532 APPENDIX. 



tenant, nor ambassador, raise auxiliaries within the bounds of Judaea, nor 
any soldiers exact money of them for winter quarters, or under any other 
pretence, but that they be free from all sorts of injuries ; and that what- 
soever they shall hereafter have, and are in possession of, or have bought, 
they shall retain them all. It is also our pleasure, that the city Joppa, 
which the Jews had originally when they made a league of friendship with 
the Romans, shall belong to them, as it formerly did ; and that Hyrcanus, 
the son of Alexander, and his sons, have a tribute of that city from those 
that occupy the land for the country, and for what they export every year 
to Sidon, twenty thousand six hundred and seventy-five modii every year ; 
the seventh year, which they call the sabbatic year, excepted, "whereon they 
neither plough, nor receive the product of their trees." 

3. According to this chronology, the seventh week of decades, 
or period of seventy years, in the 490, commences with the taking of 
Jerusalem by Herod, and the termination of the government of 
the Asmoneans. " And thus did the government of the As- 
moneans cease, an hundred, twenty, and six years after it was 
set up. This family was a splendid and an illustrious one, 
both on account of the nobility of their stock, and of the 
dignity of the high priesthood, as also for the glorious actions 
their ancestors had performed for our nation" (Ant. xiv. 16). 
The sceptre did thus depart from Tudah, and before the end of 
the government of the base and cruel monarch who seized it, 
Shi/oh came. 

4. Let the 490 years and the 2300 years of Dan. viii., which 
are clearly connected with the long Mohammedan down-tread- 
ing of the sanctuary, begin together, in the year b.c. 457 ; then 
will the 2 300 years end in the 1260th of the Mohammedan era. 

The Mohammedan year is strictly lunar — twelve lunations. 
The starting-point of the Mohammedan calendar is the new 
moon of July 15-16^, a.d. 622. This was the first of the 
Mulharram (or first month) preceding the so-called " flight of 
Mohammed." 1260 Mohammedan, or lunar years, are 1222 
solar years and six months, so fhat the 1260th Mohammedan 
year coincides with a.d. 1844, 

We have given (p. 437) the Mohammedan Edict of Tolera- 
tion, granted in 1844. 



APPENDIX. 



533 



" It is an interesting fact connected with the duration of the Moham- 
medan power, that the firman, granted to the Society for Promoting 
Christianity among the Jews, to build the Church of Christ in Jerusalem, in 
the year 1845, was dated the first day of Ramazan, 1261, answering to our 
September 10th, 1845 " (Letter of Rev. R. M. Chatfield in the Record, 
dated December 13th, 1878). 

An inspection of the subjoined Mohammedan calendar for 
the present year (1879) will show its strictly lunar character, 
i.e., that the first day of each month coincides with the first 
appearance of the new moon. Ramadan is the ninth month ; 
and the first month (Mulharram) begins this time in December, 
1878. 

The astronomic new moons this year (1879) occur on the 
following days : Jan. 22, nh., m. ; Feb. 21, 4h., m. ; Mar. 22, 
9I1., aft. ; Apr. 21, 2I1., aft. ; May 21, 5I1., m. \ June 19, 8h., 
aft. ; July 19, 9T1., m. ; Aug. 17, 8h., aft. ; Sept. 16, 6h., m. ; 
Oct. 15, 3I1., aft; Nov. 14, oh. 38m., m. ; Dec. 13, nh., m. 
It will be observed that in the Mohammedan Calendar, the 
commencement of each month takes place about two days after 
astronomic new moon, soon after the lunar fihasis (or appear- 
ance). 



Mohammedan < 


Calendar (Years 12 


96-97). 


Year. 


Month. 


Name of Months. 


Month begins. 








A.D. 1879 


1296 


2 


Saphar 


Jan. 25 


»> 


3 


Rabia 


Feb. 23 


, > 


4 


Latter Rabia 


Mar. 25 


5> 


5 


Gomada 


April 23 


>» 


6 


Latter Gomada 


May 23 


}» 


7 


Rajab 


June 21 


»> 


8 


Schaban 


July 21 


l> 


9 


Ramadan 


Aug. 19 


>> 


10 


Schawal 


Sep. 18 


♦ » 


11 


Dulkaadah 


Oct. 17 


,, 


12 


Dulhagee 


Nov. 16 


1297 


1 


Mulharram 


Dec. 15 



534 APPEXDIX. 



5. This chronology is confirmed by the interval of twelve 
jubilees, which it shows, between the termination of the 
'''seventy weeks," in a.d. 34, and the beginning of Moham- 
medan reckoning, a.d. 622 — the Hegira. 

The " seventy weeks," which, reckoned from B.C. 457, ter- 
minate in a.d. 34, are ten jubilees, 490 years. The period 
which follows from that date to the setting up of the Moham- 
medan desolation, in a.d. 622, is twelve jubilees, 588 years. 

The two periods together form twenty- two jubilees — 1078 
years ; which is, as we have yet to show, a perfect jubilee cycle. 

6. It is a further confirmation of Sir Isaac Newton's view 
that the a seventy weeks " are to be reckoned from B.C. 457, 
and not from B.C. 458, that the first of Nisan of the latter fell 
upon the Jewish Sabbath. 

As the date of the new moon of March, b.c. 458, was on 
Thursday, March 30th, 14I1. 48m. (according to Greenwich 
time), the phasis, or appearance of the new moon, did not take 
place till Friday evening, and the first of Nisan, therefore, fell 
on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. We are distinctly informed 
that Ezra commenced his journey on " the first day of the first 
month," which he would hardly have done had that day hap* 
pened to be the Jewish Sabbath, seeing he attached so much 
importance to its strict observance as a day of rest. 

7. It has been objected by some that if the passover in 
a.d. 29 coincided with the full moon of March 18th, it preceded 
the equinox by about three days. " This objection will be seen 
to be of no moment when it is considered that this very day, 
the 1 8th March, was regarded by the Western Church, prior to 
the Council of Nice, as the anterior paschal limit " (Browne's 
Chron. p. 55, who refers to the paschal cycle of St. Hippolytus). 

Clinton, as previously quoted, says : — 

l: It is no insurmountable objection that this was three days before the 
equinox, for we have seen from the preceding testimonies that a Jewish 
passover was sometimes celebrated before the equinox, and, as Mr. Benson 
properly remarks, in the Mosaic law there is no injunction which refers to 
the equinox at all. It has been objected, however, that March 18th is in- 



APPENDIX. 535 



admissible, because if the 16th Nisan is at March 20th, the corn would not 
be ripe for an offering. But the law seems only to require that when the 
sheaf was offered on the 16th of Nisan the barley should be in the ear. 
That it could be ripe enough to be reaped, and used as food, at that early 
season, is scarcely credible. If the passover had been delayed until ripeness 
in this latter sense had been attained, not only a full moon at the equinox 
would have been excluded, but many vernal full moons after the equinox ; 
and it could rarely happen that the passover could be celebrated at a vernal 
full moon at all " (" Epitome of Chron. of Rome," p. 326). 

The fact that the full moon of March 18th, a.d. 29, preceded 
the vernal equinox by about three days, to our view only renders 
it the more suitable as the paschal date, since it brings the resur- 
rection and the vernal equinox into close proximity. What more 
probable than that the new year, dating from the vernal 
equinox, and the new era, dating from the glorious resurrection, 
should commence together? The resurrection took place in 
the early morning before sunrise, and if in this month, but some 
hours before the sun entered the equinox of spring. 

8. This chronology is further confirmed by the coincidence 
between the beginning of the " seventy weeks," and the date 
of the vernal equinox (or beginning of the equinoxial year). 
The "seventy weeks" began on the 1st of Nisan, which in B.C. 
457 fell on the day of the vernal equinox, March 20-2 1 (March 
26, o.s.), just as both new moon and vernal equinox fell on 
March 20-21, 2300 years afterwards, in a.d. 1844. The exact 
time of the passover new moon in 1844 was as follows : — 
Astronomical time of true new moon at Jerusalem, Tuesday, 
March 19th, 2I1. 39m. Phasis by the modern Jewish calendar, 
Thursday, March 21st, first of Nisan. New moon thus fell on 
March 19-20, in 1844, an d by the 2300 years cycle, it fell on 
the same date in the year B.C. 457. To this let it be added, 
that if the supreme passover was on March 18, a.d. 29, the 
resurrection day was March 20 (o.s.). With this month of 
Nisan and resurrection day, what a grand series of dates 
begins. This was -the month of Israel's exodus from Egypt ; 
this was the date, 430 years before that exodus, of the call 
of Abraham and of his exodus. This was the month on 
whose first day the tabernacle was reared up ; and this the 



536 APPENDIX. 



month in which all Israel crossed Jordan, and entered the 
promised land. This was, from the exodus onwards, and still 
is, ih^ first month of the sacred seasons of the Jewish people ; 
and this has been for eighteen centuries the joyfully com- 
memorated resurrection season in the Christian Church. 

How eminently suitable that the " seventy weeks," extending 
to the time of Messiah the Prince, should commence with such 
a date ! that its beginning should be in harmony with the sub- 
sequent starting-point in the wondrous history of the new 
creation ! 

9. The chronology we have reached is still further strength- 
ened by the solar date which it gives for the day of Ezra's 
reaching Jerusalem on his divinely ordained mission of restora- 
tion, and the harmony of that date with a most important series 
of dates connected with the national calamities and deliver- 
ances of his people and of the city of Jerusalem. 

" Upon the first day of the first month began he to go up 
from Babylon, and on the first day of the fifth month came he to 
Jerusalem, according to the good hand of his God upon him " 
(Ezra vii. 9). 

As the 1 st of Nisan, B.C. 457, fell on March 20-21, the first 
day of the fifth month, just four lunations later, fell on July 
16th. Reckon from that date, July 16, 457 B.C., twenty-two 
jubilees (10 + 12), or 1078 years, a cycle of great importance in 
connection with the intercalation of months in the Jewish soli- 
lunar year, — reckon, we say, from the new moon of July 16, 
457 b.c, 1078 years, and to what date does it exactly reach? 
It reaches just to the new moon of July 16, a.d. 622 — the 
Hegira date, the first of Mulharram, or the new moon from which 
the whole Mohammedan calendar has dated for now more tha?i 
twelve hundred years. 

We may say, in passing, that the cycle of 1078 years is a 
combination of the most perfect soli-lunar cycle known, 1040 
years (that which Mr. De Cheseaux named the Daniel cycle), 
and two lunar cycles of 19 years (the most perfect of short 
soli-lunar cycles), so that its accuracy is indisputable, the sun 



APPENDIX. 537 



and moon returning at its close to within a very few hours of 
their position at its commencement. (We have yet to show 
that this cycle of mi lunar years i month, or 13,333 months, 
which just equal 1078 solar years, is the astronomic foundation 
for a perfect jubilee reckoning}) 

From this era (July 16, a.d. 622,) dates the Mohammedan 
conquest of half the world, the chronology of the scourge of 
Eastern Christendom, and the period of the long last down- 
treading of Jerusalem. 

From this era, July 15-16, a.d. 622, sweep forward 477 
complete solar years to its anniversary on July 15, a.d. 1099. 
What date have we here ? That of the day of the recapture and 
rescue of Jerusalem i7i the first Crusade. 

In 1094, Peter the Hermit received his commission from 
the Pope to preach the Crusade. In 1096, Godfrey of Bouillon, 
Hugh of Vermandois, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, 
Stephen of Chartres, Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond, and 
Tancred, set out with 600,000 crusaders, besides priests and 
monks, for the rescue of Jerusalem. 

In 1099, on July 15, Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders, 
and 70,000 Saracens put to the sword. Then was founded 
the kingdom of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon. 

What an association of names : Ezra, Mohammed, Godfrey 
of Bouillon! What events linked with that date, July 15-16, 
and with that month of Ab ! 

This was the month of the death of Aaron : " Aaron the 
priest went up into mount Hor, at the commandment of 
the Lord, and died there, in the fortieth year after the children 
of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the first day of 
the fifth month " (Num. xxxiii. 38). 

Could the dying eyes of that first of Israel's high priests 
have but looked from the awful summit of mount Hor, down 
the long line of disasters and deliverances, which the recur* 
rence of that memorable day and month should bring to his 
people, what scenes would he have beheld ! 

Far down the future he would have seen the burning of the 



533 APPENDIX. 



first glorious Temple, " the house of the Lord," and beyond it, 
the more awful burning of the second Temple ! Both these 
burnings, the first by Nebuchadnezzar, the second by Titus, 
took place in the month of Ab, and o?i the recurrence of the same 
day, the tenth of the fifth month. The historian Josephus was 
much impressed by this solemn coincidence. 

"As for that house," he says of the Temple, " God had for certain long 
ago doomed it to the fire, and now that fatal day was come according to 
the revolution of ages. 

" It was the tenth day of the month Louis (Ab), upon which it was for- 
merly burnt by the king of Babylon ; although these flames took their rise 
from the Jews themselves, and were occasioned by them ; for upon Titus' 
retiring, the seditious lay still for a while, and then attacked the Romans 
again, when those that guarded the holy house fought with those that 
quenched the fire that was burning in the inner (court of the) Temple ; but 
these Romans put the Jews to flight, and proceeded as far as the holy house 
itself, at which time one of the soldiers, without staying for any orders, and 
without any concern or dread upon him at so great an undertaking, and 
being hurried on by a certain Divine fury, snatched somewhat out of the 
materials that were on fire, and being lifted up by another soldier, he set 
fire to a golden window, through which there was a passage to the rooms 
that were round about the holy house, on the north side of it. As the 
flames went upward the Jews made a great clamour, such as so mighty an 
affliction required, and ran together to prevent it ; and now they spared 
not their lives any longer, nor suffered anything to restrain their force, 
since that holy house was perishing, for whose sake it was that they kept 
such a guard about it. Now though any one would greatly 

lament the destruction of such a work as this was, since it was the most 
admirable of all the works that we have seen or heard, both for its curious 
structure and its magnitude, and also for the vast wealth bestowed upon it, 
as well as for the glorious reputation it had for its holiness ; yet might such a 
one comfort himself with this thought, that it was fate that decreed it so to 
be, which is inevitable, both as to living creatures, and as to works and 
places also. However, one cannot but wonder at the accuracy of this period 
thereto relating ; for the same month and day were now observed, as I said 
before, wherein the holy house was burnt formerly by the Babylonians " (Ant. 
vi. 4). 

Eighteen hundred years have rolled away since that event, 
but to this day the Jewish nation scattered throughout the 
world fasts 011 the ninth of Ab. They regard this day as the 



APPENDIX. 539 



most fatal in Jewish history, and consequently keep this fast 
" with greater rigour than any other in the Jewish calendar, the 
day of atonement alone excepted." In the synagogue service 
of the evening, the scriptures read are from the book of Lamen- 
tations. This year, 1879, tne new moon of Ab (the phasis) 
falls on the 21st of July, and the feast of the ninth of iVb, on 
July 29. 

"When the stars appear the feast is over; after which the month is 
generally called Menachem Av, i.e. Av the Comforter. All letters are 
particularly thus dated. And the Sabbath following the fast is called the 
Sabbath of Comfort " (Mills on the Religious Ceremonies of the Jews, 
p. 212). 

(We should note in connection with this date Ezek. xx. : " It 
came to pass in the seventh year, in the fifth month, the tenth 
day of the month, that certain of the elders came to inquire of 
the Lord, and sat before me. Then came the word of the 
Lord unto me, saying, Cause them to know the abominations of 
their fathers." Also Zech. vii. 3 : " Should I weep in the fifth 
month, separating myself, as -I have done these so many 
years?" Also Zech. viii. 19 : " Thus saith the Lord of hosts ; 
the fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the 
fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the 
house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts ; therefore 
love the truth and peace.") 

We have endeavoured to show that the seven months of the 
Levitical calendar correspond with the seven months of soli- 
lunar cycles, measuring the seven millenaries of redemption 
history. In this connection " the first day of the fifth month " 
corresponds with the end of the first four, and the beginning of 
the last three millenaries of the world's history, or in other 
words with the era which witnessed the advent and rejection of 
the world's Redeemer, and the simultaneous abolition of 
Judaism, a fact which casts fresh light on the suitability of the 
occurrence of Aaron's death, and of Ezra's arrival at Jerusalem 
on his mission, of restoration on the typical date in question. 



S4o APPENDIX. 



10. This chronology is confirmed by the coincidence in their 
termination of the following three great periods : — 

Let the "seventy weeks," and with them the prophetic 
period and astronomic cycle of two thousand three hundred 
years, be reckoned from b.c. 457,fthen will the end of the 2300 
years coincide, not only with the 1260th year of the Mohamme- 
dan era, but also with the end of the prophetic "day, month, 
and year" period of the Ottomati Empire. 

The rise of the Ottoman Empire coincides with the capture 
of Constantinople in 1453, which was the end of the Eastern 
Ionian Empire. In his magnificent history of the Decline and 
Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon traces the course of events 
from the days of Augustus Caesar to this date and this event, 
and there terminates. The Constantine who fell before Ma- 
homet II. was the last of the Romans. On the 29th of May, 
1453, after a prodigious struggle and enormous loss of life, 
Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans, and a Turkish 
empire founded on the ruins of the nominally Christian empire 07 
the East. 

From that date the Cross, so called, throughout the entire 
East has been subject to the Crescent. 

The predicted duration of the Turkoman power (the Eu- 
phratean woe) is "a day, a month, and a year" (Rev. ix. 15). 
This on the year-day scale is one year, plus 30, plus 360, or 
391 years. The terminus a quo of the Turkoman power being 
the subversion of the Eastern Christian Empire in 1453, the 
391 years must be reckoned from that date, and so reckoned 
they end in 1844, in the 1260th year of the Mohammedan era, 
and the 2300th year from b.c. 457. 

11. A further confirmation is found in the fact that the year 
1844, the terminus of the periods already named, is also the 
terminus of twice 1260 lunar years, or 2520 lunar years 
(" seven times ") as reckoned from the overthrow of the throne 
of David, b.c. 602. 



APPENDIX. 541 



Convergence of 2300 solar and 2520 lunar years in 
a.d. 1844. Let the prophetic period of 2300 years be reckoned 
from B.C. 457, then will its termination coincide with the close 
of 2 520 lunar years, reckoned from B.C. 602 — the date of the 
subversion of the throne of David, and the transference of 
sovereignty to the Gentiles — and the 2520 lunar years will be 
bisected by the Hegira date, a.d. 622, that is, by the notable era 
of the rise of the Mohammedan power. 

The commencement of the Babylonian captivity was B.C. 
605-6. 

" The fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah king of Judah, that 
was fixe first year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon" (Jer. xxv. i). 
" Jehoiakim became his servant three years, then he turned and rebelled 
against him, and the Lord sent against him bands of the Chaldees . . . 
against Judah to destroy it according to the word of the Lord, which He 
spake by his servants the prophets. Surely by the commandment of the 
Lord came this upon Judah to remove them out of his sight, for the sins 
of Manasseh according to all that he did. " The three years of Jehoiakim's 
servitude are, therefore, the fifth, sixth, and seventh of his reign, and in the 
eighth year occurred his rebellion and complete subjugation (b.c. 602), 
"Against him came up Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and bound him 
in fetters to carry him to Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar also carried off the 
vessels of the house of the Lord to Babylon, and put them in his temple at 
Babylon " (2 Chron. xxxvi. 6, 7)- 

At this date "Jehoiakim is reconquered, removed from the throne, and, 
dying soon after, is succeeded by his son Jehoiachin, who is carried to 
Babylon, and remains in captivity many years, till his death. The crown 
was then finally removed from Judah, and the sovereignty given into the 
hands of the Gentiles " (Habershon on the Prophetic Scriptures, p. 444). 

(1) 2520 lunar years are 2445 solar (for the difference 
between 2520 lunar years, and 2520 solar, is, as we have 
before shown, 1$ years). The interval from B.C. 602 to a.d. 
1844 is exactly 2445 solar years, and is, therefore, 2520 lunar 
years. 

(2) 1260 years are consequently 1222I solar years (1222 
solar years, 6 months), and from B.C. 602 to a.d. 622, there 
are 1222-3 so ^ ar years, and, therefore, 1260 lunar years. 

(3) From a.d. 622 to a.d. 1844-5 are I222 s0 ^ ar years, and 



542 APPENDIX. 



therefore 1260 lunar years. (The 1260th year of the Hegira 
began in the middle of January, 1844, and ended early in 
January, 1845.) 

Thus, from the overthrow of the throne of David, B.C. 602, 
to the Mohammedan Edict of Toleration in 1844, there is an 
interval of " seven times " in lunar years, and this period is 
bisected by the rise of the Mohammedan power — " time, times, 
and half a time," extending to the Hegira date, a.d. 622 ; and 
" time, times, and half a time," from that date to the Edict of 
Toleration in 1844; which latter date is that of the termina- 
tion of 2300 years from the commencement of the "seventy 
weeks," B.C. 457; and also of "a day, a month, and a year" 
(or 391 years) from the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1453. 

12. These dates are further confirmed by the following 
important harmony. 

The complete overthrow of the throne of David was 
followed; fifteen years afterwards, by the destruction of the 
Temple; and the setting up of Mohammedanism at the 
Hegira date was followed, fifteen years afterwards, by the 
capture of Jerusalem, and the erection of a Mohammedan 
mosque on the foundations of the Temple. 

From this it follows that as from the overthrow of David's 
throne, in 602 B.C., to the setting up of Mohammedanism, a.d. 
622, there are 1260 lunar years, so from the destruction of 
the Temple by Nebuchadnezzar, b.c. 587, to the capture 
of Jerusalem by Omar, in a.d. 637 (followed by the erection 
of the mosque of Omar), there are also 1260 lunar years (that 
is, " time, times, and half a time " in lunar years). 

Through this memorable conquest by the Saracens — 

'•''Jerusalem, once the glory of the East, was forced to submit to a 
heavier yoke than ever it had borne before. For though the number of 
the slain, and the calamities of the besieged, were greater when it was 
taken by the Romans ; yet the servitude of those who survived was nothing 
comparable to this, either in respect of the circumstances or the dura- 
tion. For however it might seem to be utterly ruined and destroyed by 
Titus, yet by Hadrian's time it had greatly recovered itself. Now it fell, 



APPENDIX. 543 



as it were, once for all, into the hands of the most mortal enemies of the 
Christian religion, and has continued so ever since; with the exception of a 
brief interval of about ninety years, during which it was held by the Chris- 
tians in the holy war " (Ockley's " History of the Saracens," p. 212). 

The great battle of Yermouk, which decided the fate of 
Syria, was fought in November a.d. 636 (year of the 
Hegira 15). In that battle the Saracens were victorious. 
The siege of Jerusalem followed, and lasted for four months, 
the Saracen besiegers suffering much from the severity of 
winter (the winter of 636-7). On the Christian defenders 
yielding to the Saracens, " the Patriarch Sophronius appeared 
on the walls, and, by the voice of an interpreter, demanded a 
conference. After a vain attempt to dissuade the lieutenant 
of the Caliph from his impious enterprise, he proposed in the 
name of the people a fair capitulation, with this extraordinary 
clause, that the articles of security should be ratified by the 
authority and presence of Omar himself" (the successor of 
Abubecker, who was successor of Mohammed). "The 
question was debated in the council of Medina ; the sanctity 
of the place and the advice of Ali, persuaded the Caliph to 
gratify the wishes of his soldiers and enemies." Omar came, 
signed the capitulation, and entered the city. "Sophronius 
bowed before his new master, and secretly muttered, in the 
words of Daniel, " The abomination of desolation is in 
the holy place." "By his command the ground of the 
temple of Solomon was prepared for the foundation of a mosch" 

"According to the accurate survey of D'Anville (" Dissertation sur 
l'ancienne Jerusalem," pp. 42-54) the mosch of Omar, enlarged and 
embellished by succeeding Caliphs, covered the ground of the ancient temple 
(irahaiov rov fieyaKov vaov dcnrtdov, says Phocas), a length of 215, a breadth 
of 172, toises" (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall," p. 949). (The words of 
Sophronius were To (SdeXvy/Aa ttjs ep-qjxwaem to p-qdev dia AavL-qX rov 
Trpo4>rjTov iarm ev Tory ayiu? (Theophan. " Chronograph," p. 281 ; foot- 
note, Gibbon). 

" Omar, while at Jerusalem, divided Syria into two parts, and com- 
mitted all between Hauran and Aleppo to Abu Obeidah. Yezid took 
charge of all Palestine and the seashore. Amrou was sent to invade 



544 APPENDIX. 



Egypt " (Ockley). (Compare invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar after 
his conquest of Jerusalem, Jer. xliii. 10 ; xlvi. 13). "Aleppo and its 
castle was taken in four or five months ''* ; Clinton says, " probably before 
the close of 637." Meanwhile Yezid attempted Csesarea in vain, and 
Amrou "did not march directly to Egypt, but continued awhile in 
Palestine." "As he was marching towards Caesarea the Saracens found 
the weather extremely cold." " Constantine guarded that part of the 
country." " We discern here the winter of 637-8 " (Clinton, " Epit. Chron. 
Rome," p. 262). 

Thus the capture of Jerusalem by the Saracens took place 
in the summer of a.d. 637, fifteen solar years after the 
Hegira commencement {i.e., from July 15-16, a.d. 622), and 
this chronology harmonized with that of the destruction of the 
Temple and City of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar " in the 
fifth month" of the year 587 B.C., 1260 lunar years before 
(1223 solar). (a.d. 637, the fifteenth solar year from the 
Hegira era, was the sixteenth year of the Mohammedan 
reckoning, the Mohammedan calendar being lunar.") 

13. The foregoing chronology is confirmed by the interval 
which extended from the full commencement of the Times of 
the Gentiles, B.C. 602, to the supreme passover of a.d. 29 : — 

That interval is 630 years, or just half of 1260 solar years ; 
or, one quarter of the great "seven times." 

Now, 630 solar years consists of two very perfect soli-lunar 
cycles of 315 years ; and at its close the sun and moon agree 
within less than seven hours. 

In other words, 630 solar years, and 7792 lunations, measure 
the same within six to seven hours. 

It follows that the position of the passover month in the 
year a.d. 29 corresponded with that of the passover month 
in b.c. 602 ; and as the passover day in a.d. 29 seems con- 
clusively fixed to March 18, it fell on tlie corresponding day 
in the year 602 B.C.* 

* Lunations in 630 solar*years = 7777 + 7 + 7, a perfect septenary, plus 1, 
which in this case coincides with passover month A.D. 29. 

7777 + 7 + 7 lunations =159 luni- diurnal cycles; or cycles of forty-nine 



APPENDIX. 



14. Lastly, this chronology is confirmed by its remarkable 
agreement with that of the four empires and " Times of the 
Gentiles" as reckoned from the era of Nabonassar, B.C. 747. 
From the rise of the Babylonian kingdom at that era, to the 
fall of the Western Roman Empire, the interval is exactly \ 1260 
lunar years (see appended calendar of the " Times of the 
Gentiles ") ; and the commencement of the " seventy weeks," 
B.C. 457, is in the 300/^ lunar -year from the same starting- 
point, while the supreme passover year, a.d. 29, coincides with 
the Zooth of the same. 

Further, a.d. 29, the 800th lunar year froth the beginning 
of Babylonian chronology, is the 777th Nabonassar year, for 
the Babylonian and Egyptian year was one of 365 days, and 
between Feb. 26, b.c. 747, and the corresponding date in 
a.d. 29, it fell back i87d. 17I1. from the true solar year, 
which placed its commencement in a.d. 28, about seven 
months before the passover day, March 18, a.d. 29, making 
the latter year the 777th of the era. a,d. 29 was also the 
70th year of the life of the Roman Emperor, Tiberius Caesar ; 
tmd March 18 (the passover day) was the 77 th day of the 
year. 

a.d. 29 was thus the 8ooih lunar year from the Babylonian 
starting point; the 777th year of the Nabonassar era; the 
70th year of Tiberius Caesar ; and March 18, the 77th day of 
the year. The importance of these dates is confirmed by the 
consistency and perfection of the entire calendar of the 
" Times of the Gentiles " as reckoned from the Nabonassar 
era — a calendar which embraces not only the first four 
empires from the rise of the Babylonian to the fall of the 
Western Roman Empire, but also the whole duration of the 



months, in which day and month agree within a minute and a half. The 
forty-nine months luni-diurnal cycle =1447 days; and when it begins on 
the first day of week, succeeding cycle begins on Friday. If cycle of 
630 years begin on first day of week, it ends on Friday. March 18, 
a.d. 29, was Friday ; therefore March 18, B.C. 602, was Sunday : if the 
former was passover day, so was the latter. 

N N 



545 APPENDIX. 



empire of Eastern Rome, together with the rise and fall of 
the Papal and Mohammedan powers. 

IX. GREAT JUBILEE CYCLE HARMONIZING THE MONTH AND 

YEAR. 

The divinely instituted Jewish calendar was sabbatic, and 
consisted of a series of weeks of years, in which every seventh 
year was one of rest, and every forty-ninth a year of jubilee. 
The jubilee year began in the seventh month of the forty-ninth 
year, and extended to the same date in the fiftieth, and thus 
overlapped, and linked together, the forty-nine year periods. 

Thus the great jubilee restoration period was not ten times 
fifty, but ten times forty-nine, or 490 years (the "seventy 
weeks " of Dan. ix.). 

The Levitical calendar was both solar and lunar. Unlike 
the purely lunar Mohammedan calendar, it was adapted to the 
equinoctial, or solar year, for its feasts were linked with harvest 
ingatherings, while, at the same time, its months were strictly 
lunar. From this there necessarily resulted the intercalation of 
months of epact. As the annual difference between the lunar 
and solar year grew to months, such months were intercalated. 

The Jewish calendar was thus a natural, and not an artificial 
one. Its months and years were those of nature, which is in 
harmony with the fact that the Author of that system was none 
other than the Author of nature. 

Now, if this calendar was from the Author of nature, it seems 
reasonable to believe that it was adapted to some natural system 
harmonizing the unequal measures of the month and year. We 
inquire, then, to what system of intercalation was the Levitical 
calendar adapted — with what cycles of solar and lunar harmony 
does its chain of jubilees agree? 

First, then, the forty-nine years jubilee period is a soli-lunar 
cycle, in which the epact amounts to eighteen months, or one 
and a half lunar years, so that in two jubilee cycles the epac* 
is three lunar years; ninety-eight solar years equal 101 lunar 
(100 + 1, a measure analogous with octave numbers). 



APPENDIX. 547 



This ninety-eight years double jubilee cycle, or first, plus a 
second, or new week cycle (the octave principle), advances in its 
repetitions as follows: — 2 jubilees; 4; 6; 8; 10; 12; 14; 
16; 18 j 20; 22 jubilees, ox thrice seven, plus one, jubilees (an 
octave number) and then reaches a very perfect cycle of soli- 
lunar harmony. The lunar years in these periods are striking, 
and form the following series : — 

101 lunar years ; 202 ; 303 ; 404 ; 505 ; 606 ; 707 ; 808 ; 909 ; 
ioioj 1 1 1 1 lunar years. 

In 22 jubilees, or mi lunar years, the error of the jubilee 
cycle, which is id. 7I1. 55m., amounts to just a complete month, 
which is then added by intercalation to the calendar, so that 

IIII LUNAR YEARS, I MONTH, EQUAL EXACTLY 22 JUBILEES, 
OR IO78 SOLAR YEARS. 

And in. this period of 1078 solar years, or n n lunar years 
1 month, the sun recedes in the zodiac (by precession) just half 
a sign ; so that in two such jubilee cycles, the equinoxes shift back 
one complete sign in the stellar heavens, and in twenty-four such 
jubilee cycles (a new creation period 12 + 12) the directio?i of the 
pole of the earth's axis completes the circuit of its revolution. 

The measure of the epact in this cycle of 1078 years is very 
remarkable, as being equal in amount to the first cycle 
harmonizing the lunar and solar year. This fact con- 
nects the jubilee cycle with the primary cycle of the soli-lunar 
calendar. The law of intercalation may be stated as 
follows : — 

1. The first cycle harmonizing the lunar month with the solar 
year is 1 9 solar years ; but the first cycle of the lunar year and 
solar year is 32 solar years, which nearly equal 33 lunar. 

2. The second and more perfect cycle of the lunar and 
solar year is 33 solar years, in which the epact amounts to one 
complete lunar year. This period is also the first most correct 
cycle of the solar year and day. 

3. The calendar error introduced by this natural cycle is 
corrected by the natural jubilee cycle of 49 years, according to 



543 APPENDIX. 



which, instead of intercalating 3 lunar years in 3 times 33 
solar, or 99 years, 3 lunar years are intercalated in two jubilees, 
or 98 solar years. 

4. The jubilee cycle has itself an error of nearly ij days, 
which is naturally corrected as follows : when the intercalated 
months in the jubilee accumulate to 33 lunar years, that is, 

WHEN THEY EQUAL IN AMOUNT THE FIRST CYCLE OF THE 

solar and lunar year, that error accumulates to just one 
month, and the period reached is a very perfect Cycle, har- 
monizing year, month, and jubilee, — 1078 solar years. 

An examination of the appended " Calendar of the Times 
of the Gentiles," will show the coincidence of leading divisions 
of this cycle, as reckoned from the Nabonassar era, with cer- 
tain great historic termini. 

(1.) Measured from the Nabonassar era, the Babylonian 
terminus a quo, the duration of the first three empires was 707 
lunar years, or 14 jubilees. 

(2.) The death of Tiberius, under whom our Lord suffered, 
took place in the 808th lunar year from the same starting-point 
—or the completion of 16 jubilees. 

(3.) The end of tfye Jewish war, a.d. 135, the full com- 
mencement of Jewish desolation, was in the 909th lunar year, 
— the close of 18 jubilees. 

(4.) The dedication of Constantinople by Constantine the 
Great (called New Rome), and the rise of Arianism, in a.d. 
330, 331, events which prepared the way for the division of 
the Roman world into the Eastern and Western empires, 
and the Eastern and Western Churches, occurred in the 
moth and n nth lunar years from the Nabonassar era, or at 
the expiration of 22 jubilees, — the complete 1078 years cycle. 

(5.) The final division of the .Roman Empire by Valentinian 
took place in the nnth solar year from the same terminus, 
a.d. 364. (Thus to the analogous events of the last two dates, 
there extend the analogous periods, 11 n lunar and 1111 
solar years.) 

(6,) From the death of Valentinian, a.d. 375, to the end of 



APPENDIX. 549 



the Eastern Roman Empire, at the fall of Constantinople, a.d. 
1453, is one such cycle of nn lunar or 1078 solar years. 

(7.) We may add that from the commencement of the great 
"seventy weeks" jubilee period, connected with Jerusalem, 
b.c. 457, to the year of the Hegira, a.d. 622, there elapsed one 
such cycle of 22 jubilees — ten jubilees to the close of the 
seventy weeks, and twelve jubilees from their termination to the 
beginning of Mohammedan reckoning; and from the new 
moon, or "the first day of the fifth month," July 16, B.C. 457, 
the date of Ezra's reaching Jerusalem, to the new moon of 
July 15-16, a.d. 622, the starting-point in the Mohammedan 
calendar, elapsed exactly one such cycle, or 1111 lunar years 
1 month (1078 solar years). 

The perfection of this cycle will be seen when it is added 
that it is formed by the combination of two of the most perfect soli- 
lunar cycles known ; viz. 1040 years, which is the most perfect 
soli-lunar cycle of large dimensions (named by Mr. De Che- 
seaux " the Daniel cycle "), and the nineteen years cycle, which 
is the most perfect among smaller lunar cycles. 

(1040 + 19 + 19 years = 1078 years = 22 jubilees.) 

The number of months to be intercalated in this 1078 years 
cycle is striking. 

In one jubilee, or 49 years, 18 months; in ten jubilees, or 
490 years ("seventy weeks"), 180 months — half a year of 
months ; in twenty jubilees, 360 months — a year of months : 
in twenty-two jubilees, 36 months more, or 30 + 6 months, 
which, with the one extra month then to be added to correct the 
error of the jubilee cycle, amounts to 30 + 7 months, making the 
whole intercalation in the 1078 years cycle 

360, plus 30, plus 7 months ; or 

A YEAR, A MONTH, AND A WEEK OF MONTHS. 

Surely, the discovery of this 1078 years jubilee cycle is one 
of deep interest, as unveiling hidden features in the perfection 



APPENDIX. 



of that sacred calendar whose observance was appointed by the 
all-wise Author of the perpetual revolutions of the solar 
system. 

X. THE CYCLE OF THE PRECESSION OF THE EQUINOXES. 

The year of Messianic cycles (12.091 years), which we 
have already considered, is not an actual year, marked off as 
such by a revolution of one of the heavenly bodies. It is a 
period whose epact is a year of years, or a prophetic " time," a 
period into which, regarded as a vast year, a variety of impor- 
tant biblical and historic periods fit, as proportionate parts. 

We have now to deal with a period of still larger dimensions, 
which is definitely marked out as an immense year, by a slow 
but majestic motion of the axis of our earth; a motion imper- 
ceptible even by its results to the ordinary observer, but one 
with which astronomers are exceedingly familiar, and the results 
of which they have constantly to take into account ; one which 
in the slow course of ages produces very palpable effects. 

It is the revolution called the "precession of the equinoxes." 
Its precise scientific nature, and the mode and history of its 
discovery need not, however interesting, be here explained. It 
consists in a real but very slow change in the direction of the 
earth's axis, and may be detected by the change in the position 
of that point in the heavens, to which the earth's axis is directed. 
The star popularly supposed to mark that point, and called in 
consequence the " pole-star,' ; is not really over the vanishing 
point of the earth's axis, conceived as indefinitely prolonged ; 
it is nearer to it than any other conspicuous star, and it is 
every year getting nearer ; in the year a.d. 2095 ^ w ^ reach 
its nearest approximation as the earth's pole-star ; but after the 
lapse of ages, it will cease to afford any indication of the true 
position of the pole ; one star after another will become "pole- 
stars," and twelve thousand years hence, the peculiarly brilliant 
star Vega in Lyra, will be in close proximity with the point 
in the heavens to which the earth's axis will then be directed. 

This result is produced by a slow movement of the axis of 



APPENDIX. 55i 



the earth, of which the motion of a well balanced top or tee- 
totum, when it is spinning not quite upright, may give a good 
idea. The handle or prolonged axis of the little toy will be 
observed to describe a small circle in the air ; just so, the pole 
of the earth's axis is directed in succession to every point in a 
circle in the northern heavens. 

The direction of the earth's equator varies of course with this 
variation in the direction of its axis ; and the equinoctial points 
(or points at which the equator cuts the ecliptic, or sun's path 
in the heavens) must needs vary also. The equinoctial points 
slowly retrograde through all the signs of the zodiac, at the rate 
of twenty minutes and twenty seconds of time every year. 

This is the movement called by astronomers the precession 
of the equinoxes. It is a distinctly terrestrial movement, and 
therefore as much adapted as the daily axial revolution of the 
earth, to measure terrestrial time. The mechanism of the solar 
system is like an elaborate and complex chronometer, with a 
variety of golden hands of different lengths, all in ceaseless 
and harmonious motion ; one marking seconds, another minutes, 
a third hours, a fourth days, a fifth weeks, a sixth months, a 
seventh years, an eighth cycles of years, a ninth cycles of 
cycles, and so on. 

The advance of the moon in the ecliptic a distance equal to 
its own diameter, marks an hour ; the revolution of the earth 
on its axis, a day ; the lunar quarter, a week ; the complete lu- 
nation, a month ; the circuit of the earth in her orbit, a year ; 
the revolution of the lunar node, the nutation of the earth's 
axis, the falling back of the lunar year from the solar, the 
periods of the planets and their conjunctions, etc., measure 
various longer cycles, and this " annus magnus," or revolution 
of the equinoxes, measures the course of ages, for it requires 
twenty-Jive thousand eight hundred ordinary years to complete 
one revolution. 

Can this vast period have any connection with mundane 
chronology and human history ? Creation itself was less than 
three months ago on the scale of this great year ; is it likely 



552 APPENDIX. 



that any harmonies exist, between its measures and those of 
human chronology ? If the universe and its laws were the 
result of chance, nothing could well be less likely ; but if they 
are the work of a God who governs all the events of history, 
and who inspired every record and every prophecy in the 
Bible— nothing would be more natural. Let then the following 
facts speak for themselves, and bear their witness along with a 
thousand others, to the wisdom and power of the eternal God ! 

We have seen in a previous chapter, that the full normal 
period of human existence (including its initial, intra-utenne 
stage), is seventy years and from ni7ie to te?i months. 

In each of these years the equinoxes advance as we have 
said, twenty minutes and twenty seconds. Multiply this brief 
period by seventy and ten-twelfths, and the product is exactly 
four and twenty hours. In other words, the rate of the pre- 
cession of the equinoxes has been so adjusted that the full 
normal period of human life, is its day * 

So then, it is no mere figure of rhetoric that " our life is but 
a day ; " no mere poetic simile ! It is a hard astronomic fact, 
an accurate scientific statement ! As really as the life of an 
ephemera, which is born at sunrise and dies at sunset, is a day 
measured by one axial movement of our globe, so really is our 
life a day, measured by another ! 

Nor should the duration of human life in this connection be 
regarded merely as an arbitrary appointment. Let its strange 
septiform stages of growth, maturity, and decay, its all-pervad- 
ing septiform periodicity be borne in mind ; and let it be 
realized that human life itself is a mysterious cycle of cycles of 
changes, adapted in a marvellous way to the changes of inor- 
ganic nature. And yet this complex, crowded, changeful, and 



* Herschel assigns 25,870 years, and Chambers 25,817 years, as the 
period of precession. 70 years+40 weeks = 707666 years, which multi- 
plied by 365^ = 25,847 years, is a mean between the periods named. 
Seventy years and nine to ten months is as nearly as we can estimate the 
day of the vast equinox year. The average amount of precession in each 
such day is 59' 8", or one degree all but fifty-two seconds. 



APPENDIX. 553 



to the individual, all-important " threescore years and ten," is 
thus but a day, marked off as such by the ordinances of the 
sun and moon, and a slow majestic movement of our mighty 
globe ! The morning of a day of the precession of the 
equinoxes, sees our conception and birth, its noon beholds our 
maturity, marriage, and multiplication, its night closes over our 
decay and death. 

Is this accident ? Consider ! If the rate of precession 
differed from what it is, only by a single minute in a whole 
year, this harmony would be utterly destroyed ! Or if normal 
human existence were only seventy years, as it is popularly 
considered, instead of as it is accurately, between nine and ten 
months more (dated from conception, its true commencement), 
this accurate coincidence would entirely disappear.* But the 
two widely severed and dissimilar phenomena, being exactly 
what they are, it is astronomically as well as figuratively true, 
that our life is a day, and we — ephemera ! 

The term appointed by God for Judah's captivity in Baby- 
lon, was " seventy years." As the mournful years of this week 
of decades of exile, drew to a close, it was revealed that a 
larger and a brighter week, each day of which should equal 
the entire captivity, was about to dawn upon the two tribes — 
and that its seventh or sabbath day, was to witness the advent 
of Messiah. The prediction was accomplished ; the closing 
70 of that 490 years, contained the life-time of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. This memorable period, the period of Judah's restored 
national existence, of the rebuilt city and second temple, with 
its deeply moving Maccabean exploits and episodes, and its 
eventful and all-tragic close ; that period of final probation, 
between the Babylonish captivity and the present prolonged 
dispersion among the Gentiles— the "seventy weeks "• of 
Daniel, was one week of the year of the precession of the 
equinoxes. 

If now we examine seven weeks of the year of the precession 

* See Dr. Laycock's statement, quoted p. 266, 



554 APPENDIX. 



of the equinoxes, plus a fiftieth day — a pentecostal period — 
we find it is 3539 years. The period extending from the 
Exodus (b.c. 1625) to the final close of the "Times of the 
Gentiles'"' (a.d. 191 9) is about this interval. Fifty days of 
the ordinary year were appointed to elapse between Israel's 
passover and the day of Pentecost ; fifty such days did elapse 
between the death and resurrection of Christ our Passover 
and the outpouring of the Holy Ghost ; and fifty days of the 
immense year of the precession of the equinoxes, — 3539 
years, seem to be similarly appointed to elapse, between the 
exodus redemption of Israel from Egypt, and that yet future 
Pentecost, when on the house of Judah and the inhabitants of 
Jerusalem, shall be poured the spirit of grace and of supplica- 
tion, leading them to national repentance ; when they shall 
look upon Him whom they pierced and mourn because of Him, 
and say " blessed be He that cometh in the name of the Lord." 
Is not this the finger of God ? Who appointed the magnifi- 
cent cycle of the precession of the equinoxes and measured 
out its days and weeks ? He who enacted the ordinances of 
Lev. xxiii., He who arranged in his providence, the historic 
intervals of redemption history ! 

The adaptation of the precession of the equinoxes to the 
measurement of long intervals of time, is one of its most im- 
portant features.* Just as in the course of one year the sun 



* " Although this motion, slow as it is, is easily detected from year to 
year by modern instruments, it was not until the sixteenth century that its 
precise rate was ascertained. Small as is its annual amount, its accumula- 
tion, continued from year to year for a long period of time, causes a great 
displacement of all the objects in the heavens, in relation to the equi- 
noctial points from which longitudes and right ascensions are measured. 
In 71*6 years, the equinoxes retrogade 1°, and therefore in that time, the 
longitudes of all celestial objects of fixed 'position, such as the stars, have 
their longitudes augmented 1°. Since the formation of the earliest cata- 
logues in which the positions of the fixed stars were registered, the retro- 
gression of the equinoctial points has amounted to 30 , so that the present 
longitudes of all the objects consigned to these catalogues is 30 greater 
than those which are assigned to them." 

' ' Since the equinoctial points thus move backward on the eclifitic, it follows 
that the sun, after it has in its annual course passed round the ecliptic, will 



APPENDIX. 555 



advances through all the signs of the zodiac, so in the course 
of a number of ages it recedes through them all by another 
movement. Its rapid progressive motion, and its slow retro- 
grade motion, through the same signs, measure the months 
and the ages, just as its apparent diurnal motion measures the 
day. 

The precession of the equinoxes affords in consequence of 
this fact, an exceedingly interesting testimony to the truth of 
Scripture statements about the antiquity of the human race. 
The stars of the zodiac were at an early period in the world's 
history, divided into twelve groups or constellations corre- 
sponding with the twelve months of the year, and these were 
naturally known by names descriptive of the phenomena of the 
seasons in the northern hemisphere, in which, of course, the 
science of astronomy originated. Thus the constellations oc- 
cupied by the sun, in spring and early summer, were called 
by names indicative of the fertilizing influence of the sun at 
that season ; that occupied by the sun at the summer solstice, 
when it reaches its highest elevation and begins to go back, 
was called " Cancer " from the supposed resemblance to the 
movement of the crab ; the powerful heat of the sun during the 
next month (the hottest in the year) suggested the name of 
the most powerful of beasts, " Leo," the lion ; the next constel- 



arrive at either equinoctial point before it has made a complete revolution. 
The equinoctial point being 5o - i" behind the position it had when the sun 
started from it, the sun will return to it after having moved through 50*1" 
less than a complete revolution. But since the mean hourly apparent 
motion of the sun is 147 "8", it follows that the centre of the sun will return 

501 

to the equinoctial point 7~ztqii =0*33898 hrs. =20 min. 20*3 sec, before 

completing its revolution. Hence is explained the fact that while the 
sidereal year, or actual revolution of the earth around the sun, is 365 days 
6 h. 9 m. IC38 sec, the equinoctial revolution or the time between two 
successive equinoxes of the same name, is 365 days 5 h. 48 m. 50*4 sec, the 
latter being less than the former by 20 m. 20 s. 

" The successive return of the sun to the same equinoctial point, must, 
therefore, always precede its return to the same point of the ecliptic, by 
20 m. 20 s. of time, and by 50*1" of space." — Lardner's Astronomy (pp. 
710-11). 



556 APPENDIX. 



lation, the one in which the sun is in harvest-time, was taken 
to resemble a virgin bearing a sheaf of corn; the next, that 
of the autumnal equinox, when day and night are equal, was 
named ''• Libra," the balance ; the remaining rive traversed 
by the sun after the turn of the year — the winter months, of 
severe winds, rains and storms, — were called the scorpion, the 
archer, the goat, the pourer forth of water, and the fishes, or 
dwellers in water — Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, 
Pisces. 

The characteristic names thus early attached to the twelve 
constellations of the zodiac, indicating the season, which, when 
the names were given,, was connected with the sun's presence 
in any one constellation, have remained unchanged ; but the 
sun has been slowly passing out of its proper relation to them, 
in consequence of this precession of the equinoxes which we 
are considering. The sun of the vernal equinox is no longer 
in the constellation Aries, nor that of the autumnal in Libra. 
At the autumnal equinox now, the sun is in Virgo, and its 
distance from its old position indicates the length of time 
which has elapsed, since the autumnal equinox did take place 
on the sun's entering the constellation Libra. 

Now astronomy is naturally one of the oldest of the 
sciences, and the naming of the signs of the zodiac would, of 
course, be one of its first achievements. We can judge from 
the degree by which the signs now differ from the seasons how 
long ago astronomy became a science, and approximately, 
therefore, the age or antiquity of man. 

If that antiquity be as great as some surmise, men must 
have lived without becoming astronomers — or, at any rate, 
without naming the signs of the zodiac ; for, apart from all 
historical testimony, their very names tell us, that they were 
given only about the time to which Scripture assigns the rise 
of the earliest post-diluvian civilization — between two and 
three thousand years ago. 

The position of the vernal equinox at the epoch of the crea- 
tion of mm was nearly one quarter of the heavens distant from 



APPENDIX. 557 



its present place. Its close proximity to that grand starry 
circle, the milky way, which cuts the sun's path at two 
opposite regions, and its nearness to the most splendid con- 
stellation in the heavens, Orion, gives the position of the 
vernal equinox at the creation of man a very marked place on 
the map of the heavens, and one suitable to be a starting-point 
in its measurement of the ages of history. 

Seventeen centuries later, or at the time of the repeopling of 
the earth after the flood, the sun at the vernal equinox was near 
one of the most remarkable constellations in the zodiac, the 
Pleiades, and at the summer solstice near the bright star 
Regulus in Leo. The question addressed to the patriarch 
Job, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" 
may have alluded to the place of the sun at the spring equinox 
in that early age, and thus indicate the high antiquity of the 
period in which the patriarch lived, if not of the book which 
contains his story. 

Our Lord's nativity took place probably about the time of 
the autumn equinox, which eighteen centuries ago occupied a 
place in the constellation Virgo, near the star of the first mag- 
nitude in Spica Virginis. 

" The star which crowns the golden sheaf, 
And wants a name, O glory of the skies." 

The constellation Virgo is remarkable for the number of its 
nebulae, there being more in that region than in any other of 
equal space in the heavens (above three hundred). 

At the present time the positions of the sun at the summer 
and winter solstices, coincide with opposite points of the 
sublime starry circle, or milky way, with which the equinoxes 
coincided at the time of man's creation. 

The change in the direction of the earth's axis, which gives 
rise to the precession of the equinoxes, has caused the earth to 
have many a different pole-star during the last 6000 years ; but 
most of these have been too minute to attract attention. The 
pole-star of Abraham's day was, however, as conspicuous as 



558 APPENDIX. 



our present one. It was the star " a Draconis." The pyra- 
mids of Egypt were so constructed, that the narrow passages 
by which alone they can be entered, opening on their northern 
sides, pointed to its lower culmination. There is evidence to 
show that it was a much brighter star formerly than it is now. 
The two well-known stars which we call the Pointers, indicate 
by the direction of a line passing through them, our present 
pole-star. A line through the other two bright stars of Ursa 
Major, which are nearly parallel to the Pointers, will indicate the 
pole-star of Abraham's day. It is interesting to look from one 
to the other of these two pole-stars, and to trace the arc in the 
heavens, through which the pole of the earth's axis has swept, 
since God led Abram forth at night, and bade him count the 
stars, saying to the childless patriarch, " So shall thy seed be ! " 
remembering, how while that arc has been slowly traversed, 
the promise has been fulfilled ; till Abraham's seed now em- 
braces, not only the myriads of the natural, but the tenfold 
myriads of the spiritual Israel ! And yet the promise was only 
made two months ago, reckoning by the " annus magnus " of 
the equinoxes ! What will the seed of Abraham number, when 
it shall have completed its revolution, when the starry sphere 
shall have returned to the position it occupied when " God made 
promise to Abraham " ? * 

* " Though the rate at which the equinoctial points move backward on 
the ecliptic is so slow, yet the accumulated effects in the lapse of ages 
become very sensible ; and even in a moderate number of years, astrono- 
mers are obliged by those effects to reconstruct their catalogues of the stars. 
About 2000 years ago, the 360? of the ecliptic were divided in twelve 
equal portions, each of 30 , and were named after the most remarkable 
constellations of the zodiac, which they respectively crossed ; thus, the 
first 30 of the ecliptic, running across the constellation Aries, was called 
the sign of Aries, and the equinox was called the first point of Aries ; at 
that time the constellations, and the divisions of the ecliptic were equally 
called signs of the zodiac, without causing confusion. Since that epoch, 
by reason of the annual increase of longitude of 5o"2, common to all the 
stars, the constellations have all changed their places relatively to the 
divisions of the ecliptic. Though the vernal equinox is still called the 
first point of Aries, the circumstance which gave rise to that name exists 
no longer ; that point of the constellation is now removed 30 east of the 
equinox, and the beginning of Pisces has taken its place. Hence it is 



APPENDIX. 559 



XI. CYCLE OF THE REVOLUTION OF THE, SOLAR PERIGEE. 

Not only has the earth's axis the slow secular movement 
just described, but the earth's orbit has a similar one, which 
occupies even a longer period. The path in which the earth 
travels round the sun is not a circle, but an ellipse, the sun 
occupying one of the foci. The earth's distance from the sun 
consequently varies continually. The sun is three millions of 
miles nearer to the earth when in perigee, or at its nearest 
point, than it is when in apogee, or at its farthest point. When 
we speak of the sun's distance from the earth as ninety-two 
millions of miles, we allude to its mean, or medium distance. 
The line which joins the perigee and apogee points, is called 
the line of apsides. This line revolves from west to east, — in 
other words, the longer axis of the ellipse, turns gradually 
round in that direction. The motion is slower, even than that 
of the precession of the equinoxes, and is in the opposite 
direction. It has a perceptible effect on our seasons, as will 
be easily believed. When the sun is in perigee in summer, 
and apogee in winter, the former season will be hotter, and 
the latter colder, than when the reverse is the case. The sun 
is now in perigee in January, so that the winters in the 
northern hemisphere are milder, and the summers cooler. As 
the seasons are reversed at the antipodes, the opposite effect 
is produced there. 

The period of the revolution of the perigee, according to 
its present rate, is about 109,800 years, or more than four times 
that of the precession of the equinoxes ; but it varies enor- 



necessary to make a distinction between the signs of the ecliptic, and those 
groups of stars which bear the same name ; the former are spaces of 30 
reckoned from the actual position of the vernal equinox ; the latter also 
occupy 30 , but are in continual motion along the ecliptic, and are at 
present about 30 in advance of the signs of the same name. The begin- 
ning of the sign Aries will always be in the intersection of the ecliptic 
and equator, the beginning of the constellation Aries, only after intervals 
of twenty-six thousand years ; when the sun enters the sign Cancer, it will 
always be midsummer ; but he will, in the course of ages, enter the constel- 
lation Cancer at every season of the year." — Hymers 1 Aslron., p. 43. 



$6o APPENDIX. 



mously at distant intervals. All the changes of human history 
are, of course, dwarfed into insignificance by such a stupendous 
year as this, and can have little relation to it as a whole, or to 
its major divisions. If the revolution of the line of the apsides 
is intended, as doubtless it is, to be a useful hand on the face 
of the great chronometer, it must be to future generations of 
men, and in the ages to come. Yet we may inquire whether 
there is any observable harmony between its least and our 
greatest measures, and we find that, as far as the thing is pos- 
sible, relations similar to those we have noted elsewhere, exist 
here also. 

The day of this great revolution is 300 years, and its week 
is 2100 years — nearly the same period as the month of the 
precession of the equinoxes, and measuring the Jewish age 
from Abraham to the fall of Jerusalem, and the patriarchal 
age from Abraham, back to Adam. This period was, by the 
Hebrew chronology, as nearly as can be calculated, 4200 
years, — two weeks of the slowly accomplished year of the solar 
perigee, bisected by the life of the Father of the faithful. 

Seven months of this great year comprise about three revolu- 
tions of the equinoxes with reference to the solar perigee, — 
another cycle which we must now consider. 

XII. CYCLE OF THE VARIATION IN THE LENGTH OF THE 
SEASONS. 

We have already considered two vast revolutions connected 
with the solar system : that of the equinoxes, and that of the 
solar perigee. We now glance at a third, which is created by 
the combined effects of these two, and which causes a cyclical 
variation in the length and character of our seasons. 

Astronomically, spring, summer, autumn, and winter, are 
measured by the sun's passing the four quarterly points of his 
annual path, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the winter 
and summer solstices. These four seasons are neither equal 
nor uniform in length ; they differ among themselves every 
year, and they all vary from year to year. 



APPENDIX. 561 



Were the earth's orbit a true circle they would be of uni- 
form length, and invariable. The existing irregularities are 
occasioned by the form, and by the movement, of the earth's 
orbit. Being elliptical, its quarters are of course unequal ; and 
changing as it does continually, the direction of its longer axis, 
the relation of the different quarters to the equinoxes changes 
also. 

The length of the seasons would therefore vary, even if the 
equinoxes were stationary.* But we have seen that while the 
solar perigee advances, they retrograde, in consequence of the 
slow change in the position of the earth's axis ; and the cycle 
of the variation in the length of the seasons, results from both 
these movements. It is shorter consequently either than the 
perigee or equinox cycle, and runs its course in 20,900 years. 

The same causes affect the comparative length of the fore- 
noon and afternoon of the day. These two are not equal as 
might be supposed. Only four times a year, is the interval 
from sunrise to noon (mean) equal to that from noon to sunset. 
The variation, as a glance at the almanac will show, sometimes 
amounts to half an hour. This variation is not the same from 
year to year, but changes throughout this same cycle of 20,900 
years. 

The equinoxes retrograde at the rate of one day in 70-71 
years ; the perigee advances at the rate of one day in 300 
years. The compound result in this cycle ofthe length of the 
seasons, is an advance of the perigee, with reference to the 
true equinoctial year, of one day in 5 7 J years, or one week in 
400 years. 

On the scale of this great season year of 20,900 years, the 



* In the year 1850, or the middle ofthe present century, the time elapsing 
between the equinoxes and solstices was as follows : — 



Spring equinox to summer solstice . 
Summer solstice to autumnal equinox 
Autumnal equinox to winter solstice 
Winter solstice to spring equinox . 



d. 


h. m. 


9 2 


20 57 


93 


14 


89 


17 33 


89 


1 17 



o o 



562 APPENDIX. 



interval between the creation and the flood was about one month. 
According to the Bible chronology the creation took place 
1656 years before the deluge. The flood lasted one year, so 
that the interval between the creation of Adam, and Noah's 
entrance on a new world, was 1657 years. This is 29 days or 
about one month, of the season cycle (four weeks and a day).* 

The period revealed in vision to Abram, during which his 
seed should be a stranger in a land not their own, was a week 
of this cycle, " four hundred years." This was the period which 
terminated at the exodus passover. (Gen. xv. 13 ; Exod. xii. 41.) 

In this vast cycle of 20,900 years the solar perigee coincides 
in turn with each of the four quarterly points, the equinoxes 
and solstices.f 



* 400x4=1600+57 = 1657. 

*h " In the year 3958 B.C., or, singularly enough, near the epoch of the 
creation of Adam, the longitude of the sun's perigee coincided with the 
autumnal equinox ; so that the summer and autumn quarters were of equal 
length, but shorter than the winter and spring quarters, which were also 
equal. In the year 1267 A.D., the perigee coincided with the winter sol- 
stice ; the spring quarter was therefore equal to the summer one, and the 
autumn quarter to the winter one, the former being the longest. In the 
year 6493 A.D., the perigee will have completed half a revolution, and will 
then coincide with the vernal equinox ; summer will then be equal to 
autumn, and winter to spring ; the former seasons, however, being the 
longest. In the year 11,719 a. D., the perigee will have completed three- 
fourths of a revolution, and will then coincide with the summer solstice ; 
autumn will then be equal to winter, but longer than spring and summer, 
which will also be equal, and finally, in the year 16,945 a.d., the cycle will 
be completed by the coincidence of the solar perigee with the autumnal equi- 
nox. This motion of the apsides of the earth's orbit, in connection with the 
inclination of its axis to the plane of it, must quite obviously have been the 
cause of very remarkable vicissitudes of climate in pre-Adamic times. One 
result of this position of things we may readily grasp at this moment. As a 
matter of fact, in consequence of our seasons being now of unequal length, 
the spring and summer quarters jointly extend to i86 d . ; while the autumn 
and winter quarters only comprise I78 d . The sun is therefore a longer 
time in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere : hence the 
northern is the warmer of the two hemispheres. Probably it may be taken 
as an incidental proof of this fact, that the north polar Regions of the earth 
are easier of access than the south polar regions. In the northern hemi- 
sphere navigators have reached 8i° of latitude, whereas 71 is the highest 
attained in the southern hemisphere;" — Chambers' Astron., p. 75. 3rd edit. 
1877. 



APPENDIX. 563 



These coincidences are the leading epochs in its long dura- 
tion. Human history goes back far enough to take in two of 
them only. The first — the coincidence of the solar perigee with 
the autumnal equinox, took place near the era of the creation, B.C. 
3958, or, according to the vulgar chronology, within fifty years 
of that event. But the date of the creation as given by Clinton, 
probably the nearest possible approach to the truth (absolute 
certainty being unattainable from lack of Scripture data, to within 
forty or fifty years) is b.c. 4138. From B.C. 3958, to a.d. 29, 
the date of the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, 
there elapsed ten weeks or seventy days of this year.* 

The predicted interval (Gen. xv.) preceding the typical re- 
demption of the Passover, was -400 years ; the interval from 
this great astronomic epoch to the antitypical redemption — ■ 
Christ our passover sacrificed for us — was ten times as long, 
4000 years. 

The second era of coincidence between the perigee and the 
equinox revolutions, was in the middle of the 1 3th century. 

" In the year a.d. 1250, the major axis was perpendicular to 
the line of the equinoxes, the solar perigee coincided with the 
solstice of winter, and the apogee with that of summer. On 
that account Laplace proposed the year a.d. 1250, as a univer- 
sal epoch, and that the vernal equinox of that year, should be 
the first day of the first year." 

The more accurate measures of modern astronomy, place 
this coincidence in a.d. 1267, a few years later. It occurred 
in the middle of the dark ages, and without laying much stress 
on the fact, it is surely worthy to be noted. The solar perigee 
influences had to struggle with the winter position of the sun ; 
and were reduced to a lower ebb than either before or since. 
Two winters coincided, the lowest wintry depression of the 
sun, and the shortest day of his influences, at the moment of 
his nearest approach to the earth, or perigee, and winter, cold, 



* B.C. 3958 to a.d. 29 = 3986 years, which wants only 14 years (a frac- 
tion of a day on this scale) of 4000 years. 



564 APPEND!, 



dark, icebound, and fatal, in the moral world of Christendom. 
The 13th century was the darkest in all Papal history, persecu- 
tion was at its height, the crusade against the faithful Albigenses 
raged for twenty years from a.d. 1208; the Inquisition arose 
about the same time. Riddle, the ecclesiastical chronologist, 
fixes on this period, and especially the year a.d. 1268, as that 
in which " the Papal dominion was at its utmost height." As- 
tronomy assigns a.d. 1267, as the year of this coincidence of 
the solar perigee with the winter solstice. But whether any such 
harmony be admitted or not, the fact remains, this great turn- 
ing point in the revolution of the perigee took place at a turn- 
ing point of history — the culmination of the power of the 
Papacy, since which it has steadily declined to its fall. 

And lastly, as seven months of the ordinary year compre- 
hended the typical history of redemption, embodied in the 
ordinances of the feasts of the Lord, and as seven months of the 
year of Messianic cycles comprehend the entire range of the 
historic and prophetic times of human history as revealed in 
Scripture, so the entire year of Messianic cycles is about seven 
months of this great cycle of the variation of the seasons. We 
have reached here almost the top step of the ladder, the last 
" week " in the wonderful ascending scale of periods which we 
find in Scripture, in physical nature, and in the solar system. 
We have passed in review, the week of days, the week of weeks, 
the week of months, the week of years, the week of weeks of 
years, the week of decades, and the week of weeks of decades 
(490 years) ; the week of years of years, or the " seven times * 
of prophecy (2520 years); and the week of millenaries. 
Here where Scripture leaves us, astronomy takes us by the 
hand, and shows us that this vast and comprehensive week of 
millenaries, is only a week of months, seven months of a larger 
solar year, a year whose days are soli-lunar cycles, and that this 
year itself is again a week of months — seven months of a solar 
year, more gigantic still. 

Nor have we any reason to suppose the series of septiform 
periods ends here ! As the telescope reveals worlds on worlds, 



APPENDIX. 565 

system behind system, and nebula behind nebula, as far as 
human eyesight, aided by the finest optical instruments, can 
penetrate into the profundities of space, so this septiform sys- 
tem of measurement of times and seasons, may have pervaded 
all the past eras of geologic change, and may be destined to 
pervade all the ages to come, and the revolution of our own sun 
and all its attendant planets, in its incalculable orbit around its 
centre of gravity, wherever and whatever that be, a revolution 
whose period is so vast that inconceivable ages may roll away, 
ere it can even be calculated, that revolution itself, may prove 
to be only " a week " of some other, bordering even more nearly 
on eternity. 

XIII. CYCLE OF THE EXCENTRICITY OF THE EARTH'S ORBIT. 

Reference has already been made to the fact that the earth's 
orbit is not a perfect circle, but slightly oval in form, the ex- 
centricity of the ellipse being about one sixtieth part of its 
semi-diameter. 

This excentricity is not uniform, but gradually decreasing. 
It will continue to decrease for many thousands of years, and 
then, having reached the nearest approach to a circular form 
which it will ever make, the orbit will, during succeeding ages, 
elongate once more, and slowly resume its more elliptical form. 

A change in the excentricity of the earth's orbit means a 
diminution or increase in the length of its longer axis, and 
consequently of the mean amount of heat actually received 
from the sun ; and as animal and vegetable life are dependent 
on a certain uniformity in the supply of heat, the question as 
to the limits of change of excentricity in the orbit of the 
earth, becomes one of vital importance. 

These limits have been ascertained. The amount of excen- 
tricity for many ages, past and future, has been calculated. 
It has been proved that the change has narrow limits, and a 
tendency to correct itself. M. Leverrier, with the aid of per- 
fectly reliable data, as Herschel tells us, has assigned both the 
superior and inferior limits of the excentricity of the earth's 



566 APPENDIX. 

orbit, and has shown that the inferior limit, or nearest approach 
to a circle, will be reached in about 23,903 years from the 
present time, a.d. 1879. 

The revolution of the equinoxes occupies, as we have seen, 
25,800 years. It follows, therefore, that the greatest event in 
all human history, the incarnation and death of the Son of God, 
took place about one revolution of the precession of the equi- 
noxes from this great epoch of the inferior limit of the earth's 
excentricity : for 23,903 + 1879 = 25,782; and the equinox 
year is 25,800. 

In other words, the immense interval between the accom- 
plished advent of Immanuel, and that great astronomic era, 
the still far-distant " inferior limit," is measured by one revo- 
lution in the direction of the earth's axis. 

Now, the precession of the equinoxes is a primary element 
in all astronomical calculations ) it affects the place of every, 
object in the heavens with reference to the earth. If we admit 
the principle that the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, have 
any connection with the cycles of history, as marking the 
chronological positions of their great crises, the question has 
a deep interest, — What was the position of the heavens when 
the Son of God was on earth, and when will that position be 
restored ? The reply is : AVhen the earth's orbit attains the 
inferior limit of its excentricity, and not till then, will the pre- 
cession year have run its round, and the position of the pole, 
of the sun in the zodiac, and of the starry heavens above 
us, be restored to what they were when the star stood over the 
manger of the Babe of JBethlehem. The return of the universe 
to the position it occupied 1879 years ago, will be a milestone 
in the journey through endless ages. 

XIV. THE PROPORTION WHICH SOLAR REVOLUTIONS BEAR TO 
LUNAK, AND DIURNAL TO ANNUAL, IS OCTAVE, OR JUBILAIC. 

In order to understand and appreciate this remarkable fact, 
we must look at it in the light of the Divine system of times 
and seasons revealed in Scripture. 



APPENDIX. 567 



Scripture sets before us two creations, and two chronologies. 
Nothing can be more evident than that while septenary 

NUMBERS ARE LINKED IN SCRIPTURE WITH THE OLD CREATION, 
OCTAVE NUMBERS ARE AS CONSISTENTLY ASSOCIATED WITH THE 
NEW. 

The day which commemorated the completion of the old 
creation was the seventh ; whereas the day on which the 
glorious resurrection of our Lord took place, and which still 
commemorates it, the day which completed the work of re- 
demption, is the eighth, or first of a new week. The same 
distinction pervades the whole Bible. The ancient ordinance 
of circumcision, which typified, as we learn from the Apostle 
Paul, the putting off of the old nature, in order to a renovation 
of the being, was appointed to take place on the eighth day 
after birth. The leper could not be cleansed till the eighth 
day. The first sheaf of harvest was presented on an eighth 
day, and the day of Pentecost, with its fuller first-fruit offering, 
was an eighth day, which was also a fiftieth. The feast of 
tabernacles both began and terminated on an eighth day, "the 
last day, that great day of the feast/' The year of jubilee, 
with its restorations and rejoicings, was a fiftieth year. 

Not only did our Lord's resurrection take place on an eighth 
day, a first day of the week, but by his subsequent appearances 
in the midst of his disciples on that day, He sanctioned the 
recognition of the first day of the week, instead of the seventh, 
as the day of Christian worship and rest. The early disciples 
met together to break bread on that day, the Apostle Paul 
enjoined collections to be made on that day for the poor, and 
the Christian Church in all lands and ages, has, ever since 
apostolic times, recognised the eighth, or first day, as the 
Lord's day. 

The advent of the quickening Spirit, accompanied by the 
sudden coming of a sound from heaven as of a mighty 
rushing wind, and the appearing of cloven tongues like as of 
fire on the disciples, their baptism with the Holy Ghost, and 
endowment with power from on high, took place on an eighth 



563 APPENDIX. 



day, which was also a fiftieth ; for it was " when the day of 
Pentecost was fully come," that by one Spirit they were all 
Daptized into one body, (i Cor. xii. 13.) 

And as seven is a Scripture number of old creation com- 
pleteness, so also is twelve. There is an analogy between 
these two numbers ; the first is three added to four and 
the second is three multiplied by four. In the Jewish 
tabernacle the seven-branched candlestick, and the table with 
its twelve loaves of shew-bread, emblematized one and the same 
Israel. Of both, the tribes of Israel and the Apostles of Christ, 
the primary number is twelve ; but just as seven, and its square 
forty-nine, are in the new creation numbers changed into 
eight and fifty, so twelve in the same way is changed or merges 
into thirteen. The multiplication of Joseph, who was typically 
raised from the dead, into two tribes, and the addition to the 
number of the Apostles of the one born out of due time, the 
Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul, raised the number of the tribes 
of Israel, and the Apostles of Christ, respectively, from twelve 
to thirteen. In the new Jerusalem, where the two are united, 
in the names on the gates and foundations of the city, the 
thirteen are again resolved into twelve plus twelve, twenty-four 
in all ; and twenty-four symbolic elders are seen in vision, seated 
around the throne. To the twelve of the natural Israel, God 
has added a new twelve 3 the final number is twice twelve, — 
twenty-four. 

From all this it is obvious that a transition from the seven- 
fold and the forty-nine fold, to the eightfold and the fifty- 
fold, and from the twelvefold to the thirteen-fold, and the 
final twenty-four fold, takes place in the formation of Bible 
new creation numbers. 

The principle of all this is simple. It is a question of two 
orders of things, a first and a second, an old and a new; 
Creation and Redemption ; the heaven and the earth that are 
now, and the new heavens and the new earth, the earthly and 
the heavenly ; the first man a living soul, the second man the 
Lord from heaven ; man in Adam, and man in Christ ; and as 



APPENDIX. 569 



the numbers seven and twelve are connected with the old, so 
eight and thirteen are linked with the new ; the eighth is the 
first of a new seven, the thirteenth, of a new twelve. 

Thus in music, the scale consists of seven tones (diatonic), or 
twelve semitones (chromatic). The eighth tone, or octave, and 
the thirteenth semitone are identical, and are the first of a new 
or second scale. 

We shall now show that these are the numbers stamped on 
the proportion which solar revolutions bear to lunar, and diurnal 
to annual. 

First : This is the case in the proportion which the solar day 
bears to the lunar quarter. Let it be noted that the lunar 
quarter is a distinct interval marked out by obvious phases, 
and by definite world-wide tidal phenomena. The lunar quarter 
contains always seven days, and nine hours of an eighth — its 
measures, as estimated by solar days, have an octave character 

Secondly : The same measure on a larger scale marks the 
proportion of the lunar quarter to the solar year. The solar 
year contains seven times seven, or forty-nine lunar quarters, 
plus half a fiftieth. 

Thirdly : Octave measures mark the proportion which cycles 
of the day and month bear to cycles of the day and year. The 
first accurate day and month cycle is seven times seven months 
(in forty-nine months the day and month agree within a minute 
and a half). The first cycle of the day and year is four years 
(leap year). The four years cycle is the forty-nine months 
cycle, plus half a fiftieth. 

Fourthly : Octave measures mark the still more perfect day 
and year cycle of thirty-three years — a cycle so perfect that its 
slight error does not grow by repetition to a day in less than 
5000 years. The fraction of a 366th day in the solar year 
grows in ^Z years to eight days ; in other words, when the solar 
year fraction accumulates to a week, plus the first day of a new 
Week, the solar day and year agree. 

Fifthly : Analogous measures mark the proportion of the 
lunar month to the solar year. The eightfold and the thirteen- 



570 APPENDIX. 



fold harmonize. Eight is the 1 first of a new seven ; thirteen 
the first of a new twelve. We have already observed that the 
eighth tone in music, and the thirteenth semitone, are identi- 
cal. The solar year contains twelve months, and about the 
third of a thirteenth. Further, this fraction of a thirteenth 
month grows to a complete week of months in the cycle of nine- 
teen solar years ; in other words, when the soli-lunar difference 
has accumulated to seven months, or when it has produced a 
new week of months, then solar year and lunar month agree. 

Sixthly : The same thing marks the proportion of the calen- 
dar year of 360 clays to the solar. The calendar year is a 
natural one. There are nearer 30 days in a lunar month than 
29, and nearer 12 months in the year than 13 ; hence 12 
months of 30 days each, form a natural calendar 5^ear. The 
difference between this year and the solar is 5J days, and this 
fraction grows first to a complete year in the septiform period 
of seventy years. Seventy solar years contain seventy soli- 
lunar, plus a seventy-first. A septenary measure of the one and 
an octave measure of the other, unite in a cycle of harmony. 

Seventhly : There is a slow revolution of the equinoxes, in 
which the place of the sun at the equinox recedes 20m. 20s. 
every year, and recedes one whole year in 25,850 years. The 
day of this vast year measures seventy solar years plus nine to 
ten months of a seventy-first : and the sun gains on the moon 
every such day, seven hundred and seventy clays. From the first 
to the last, all these proportions have an octave character. 
These are the mutual proportions which have been given by 
the Almighty Power which controls the revolutions of worlds, to 
days and months and years. These, too, are the measures 
which the Author of Holy Scripture has impressed on the entire 
system of new creation numbers, running through the whole 
complex economy ot law and gospel. How profound the 
agreement between these two portions of the one glorious 
plan ! How full of resurrection new creation hopes and har- 
monies, this wondrous structure of the works and word of 
God! 



APPENDIX. 571 

XV. GROWTH OF THE EPACT TRACED, FROM ITS PRIMARY 
CYCLES, TO ITS DEVELOPMENT IN THE PROPHETIC TIMES. 

There are nearer twelve months than thirteen in the solar 
year, twelve months, therefore, constitute a lunar year. 

The surplus fraction of a thirteenth month may be considered 
a new lunar year element in the solar year. It is commonly 
called " the epact." 

We have already pointed out the association in Scripture 
of eight and thirteen as new creation numbers ; and we noticed 
the analogous fact that in the natural arrangement of sounds 
the eighth tone and thirteenth semitone are the same, and form 
the first note of a new scale. 

We have now to trace the growth of this new lunar year 
element in the solar year, to complete periods of months and 
years. In doing so we shall follow its development in its 
elementary natural cycles, and in the Levitical and prophetic 
times. 

1. The First Period in which the Epact becomes a 
complete Month, is three Solar Years. 

Under the Divine law the time appointed for the presenta- 
tion of tithe offerings was the end of every three years, an 
interval analogous with the oft-recurring three days resurrection 
period. Our Lord's ministry also extended over three full 
years. 

(Three solar years exceed three lunar by one lunar month 
and 3d. 2h. 17m.) 

2. The Second Epact Cycle, Eight Years. 

As the seventh year was made Sabbatic in the Levitical law, 
the eighth was the first of a new series. In eight years the 
epact grows to three months. Both eight and three are used in 
Scripture as new creation numbers. 

(Eight lunar years + three months, exceed eight solar years 
by id. 14b. 11m.) 



$71 APPENDIX. 



3. The Third Epact Cycle, Eleven Years. 

This cycle is a combination of the two previous ones ; it is 
one-third of the thirty-three years cycle. Its epact is four 
months, or the third of a lunar year. 

(Eleven solar years exceed eleven lunar + four months by 
1 d. 12 h. 7 m.) 

4. The Nineteen Years, or Lunar Cycle. 

A celebrated soli-lunar cycle, discovered by the Greek Meton, 
and hence often called the Metonic cycle. As the eight years 
cycle errs by excess, and the eleven years by defect, the combina- 
tion of the two makes this very perfect cycle. 

Here we have the combination of two cycles whose epacts 
are three months and four months, producing a perfect cycle- 
whose epact is seven months. 

Thus, when the epact, or new month element, has so accumulated 
as to produce a new week of months, the sun and moon almost 
perfectly agree, and this cycle of their harmony becomes the 
unit of higher cycles. 

(The 235 months of this cycle exceed nineteen solar years 
by only 2I1. 4m. 4s.) 

5. The Thirty Years, or Prophetic Month Cycle. 
The combination of the nineteen years and eleven years 

cycles produces this cycle, which measured the life of our 
Lord up to his baptism, and is also the prophetic month. 
(Thirty solar years exceed 371 months by id. ioh. 2m.) 

6. The Messianic, or Thirty-three Years Cycle. 

In this period the fraction of a thirteenth month in the solar 
year grows to twelve complete months. 

In the same period the fraction of a day in the solar year 
grows to eight complete days. 

This cycle measured the number of complete years in out 
Lord's earthly life. 

He is the head of the new creation, the founder of a second 
Israel, building his church on a new twelvefold foundation, and 



APPENDIX. 573 



his earthly days were measured by the period in which the new 
month element in the solar year becomes twelvefold, and as such a 
new year. 

7. The full Messianic Cycle, Thirty-three Years, 
Seven Months, and Seven Days. 

In the period of the previous cycle, plus seven months, and 
seven days, the epact becomes a complete solar year — a complete 
neiu year. 

This soli-lunar cycle which we shall henceforth call the The 
Messianic Cycle, contained, as we have shown, the entire 
period of our Lord's life on earth. 

This cycle is the day, or unit in the chronology of 
Redemption history. 

8. The Thirty-eight Years Cycle. 

This is two lunar cycles, and its epact two weeks of months. 
In the history of Israel it was the period which followed the 
solemn oath, that that generation should not enter into God's 
rest — the period of the wandering in the wilderness of the 
rejected race.* 

9. Forty-five Years, the Terminal Period of the Pro- 
phetic Times. 

This is an historic period, linked with full entrance into 
Canaan rest, and also, as we have seen, the terminal one in 
the series of prophetic times. 

Its number of years is the sum of the first nine numbers. 

It is not a cycle of the month and year, but its epact is 
seventy weeks of days (49od.). 

The week, the square of the week, ten times the square of the 
week, are associated in Scripture with completeness. We have 

* Forty years, the full term of the wilderness journey, contains ten cycles 
of the solar year and day, and consequently ten of the lunar month and day, 
or seventy weeks of months. The difference between these two sets of cycles 
amounts in forty years to a septiform measure, twice seventy days. 



574 APPENDIX. 



seen this in days, and in years ; here it is in epact. Forty-five 
years is a period producing a new seventy weeks of days in the 
inter-relation of solar and lunar years. 

10. The Jubilee, Forty-nine Years. 

The seven weeks and a day of the pentecostal period in the 
Levitical calendar, and the seven weeks of years and a year, 
or fifty years, of the Jewish jubilee, were analogous, and pro- 
portioned to each other on the scale of a year for a day. Both 
terminated in seasons of sacred joy. 

They were simply octave periods on a higher scale. The pro- 
portion of seven days to seven weeks is that of a week to its 
square. The eighth day follows the termination of the first, 
the fiftieth of the second. 

The jubilee, or 49 years, is an epact cycle. 

(49 years exceed 606 months by id. 7I1. 55m.) 

"The fiftieth year," or year of jubilee (Lev. xxv. 9, 10), began 
011 the 10th day of the seventh month of the forty-ninth year, the 
day of atonement. All our deliverance, all our liberty, all 
our restoration, all our springs of joy. date from the atoning 
work of Him who has entered for us within the veil, having 
obtained eternal redemption. From his atoning work dates a 
new beginning, and nobler order of things, in the experience 
of his people. 

it. The Millennial Cycle, iooo Years. 

The epact in 1000 years is a month of years. 

We stated that the chronology of Redemption history is 
measured by periods in which the epact (or new year element) 
grows to months and years, and to weeks of years, months of 
years, and weeks of months of years. 

" A thousand years are with the Lord as one day," a mil- 
lenary therefore may be considered a unit in the Divi?ie reckon- 
ing. In this period the epact becomes also a unit — a month 
of years. 

From this it follows that seven thousand years are as a week, 



APPENDIX. 575 



and that the epact of seven thousand years is a week — seven months 
of years. 

The week of millenaries is in obvious harmony with the 
Scripture series of weeks on various scales, and its epact with 
the week of months of the sacred Levitical calendar. 

There are two kinds of months, the lunar and the soli-lunar ; 
the former is 29! to 29! days ; the latter is 30 days. 

The epact in 1000 years amounts to months analogous to thesr 
In 1000 true solar years the epact is 29! solar years : — 

In 1000 solar years of 365 days measure (the Babylonian 
and Egyptian year), the epact is just 30 lunar years. (1000 
365-days years are 365000 days ; and 1000 and 30 lunar 
years, are 365000 days, less 2 days.) 

The 365-days year nas a 25-years cycle of remarkable exact- 
ness, in which the epact is just nine months. This cycle is 
more accurate than the lunar, and was known to the Egyptians. 
There are four times 25 years in 100, forty in 1000, and 280 
in 7000 years ; consequently the epact is 3 lunar years in 100, 
30 lunar years in 1000, and 210 lunar years, or seven months 
of years, in j 000 years. 

In the period which exceeds 1000 true solar years, by 7 
solar years, and 7 months, the epact is 30 complete solar 
years : 1007V. 7m. are a month of Messianic cycles. 

12. Epact in the "Seventy Weeks " of Messianic Pro- 
phecy. 

The " seventy weeks," or 490 years, are a great jubilee. 
They bear the same tenfold proportion to the 49 years jubilee 
period, that the 70 years of Captivity bore to the Levitical 
week of years. 

The epact of 490 years, — twice seven solar years, plus seven 
months, and by calendar measure seven calendar years plus seven 
weeks, — has the octave form of a larger week plus a lesser. 

In the chronology of Redemption history the Messianic 
cycle is a day, and the millenary, a month. In 490 years there 
are fourteen and a fraction such days (half a month), so that 



5/6 APPENDIX. 



490 years bears the same proportion to the week of millenaries 
(7000 years) that half a lunar month does to seven lunar months 
\n the Levitical calendar. 

A half-month period in the Levitical calendar terminated 
with the feast of passover; as here, half a month of larger 
measure terminated in the accomplishment of Redemption. 

13. The Sanctuary Cycle, 2300 Years. 

This is the third in centuries of 7000 years. One-third of 
the seven months Levitical calendar terminated in the feast of 
Pentecost. One-third is a characteristic Scripture portion, 
whether of the week of months, or of that of millenaries. 

One-third of seven lunar months is 68-69 days. 

The epact in 2300 solar years is 68-69 solar years. 

In 2300 365-days years, the epact is exactly 69 lunar years. 

In 2300 solar years the epact (68-69 solar years) is exactly 
seventy lunar years and seven months. The accuracy of this 
measure is such as to make 2300 years a secular soli-lunar 
cycle. 

14. The 1260 Years Papal Cycle contrasted with 
the 1335 Years Prophetic Period terminating in 
Resurrection Blessedness. 

The first of these is the period of the dominion of the 
persecuting Papal power — " They shall be given into his hand 
until a time, times, and the dividing of time " — " It shall be 
for a time, times, and a half, and when he shall have accom- 
plished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these 
dungs shall be finished." (Dan. vii. 25 and xii. 7.) 

The second of these terminates in resurrection blessedness. 

" Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh unto the thousand, 
three hundred, and five and thirty days." 

The epact of the first is eminently sixfold, just as is the mark 
or number attached to the power of which it is the period. 
The epact of the second is eminently sevenfold. 



APPENDIX. 577 



To exhibit the contrast, let us place them side by side. 
1260 years contains 66 lunar cycles. 
1335 years contains 70 lunar cycles. 
(The lunar cycle is the first closely harmonizing solar 

and lunar movements. Its epact is seven months, as 

we previously stated.) 

The epact in 66 lunar cycles is 66 weeks of months. 
The epact in 70 lunar cycles is 70 weeks of months, or 
490 months. 

1260 years contain 66 lunar cycles, plus 6 years. 

Epact, 66 weeks of months, plus 60 days. 
1335 years contain 70 lunar cycles, plus 5 years. 

Epact, 70 weeks of months, plus 7 weeks of days. 

By Prophetic or Calendar year measure. 
The epact in 1260 years is thrice six calendar years, 

plus thrice six weeks, or — 
Six thousand, six hundred and six days : 
The epact in 1335 years is a thousand weeks, (within 

a day.) 
The contrast is complete. 

15. The "seven times," with its added seventy-five 
years. 

The " time, times, and a half," is half a week of " times " — 
1260 years. 

To this period prophecy adds 75 years t making 1335 years. 
(Dan. xii.) 

The week of which 1260 years is the half, is 2520 years. 

The epact of 2520 years is 75 so/ar years. 

Thus to the half week of "times" prophecy adds 
A period equal to the epact of the entire week of 

" TIMES." 

The addition to 2520 years of a period equal to its epact is 
a remarkable fact, and cannot be accidental. Let it be noted 

p p 



578 APPENDIX. 



that 2520 lunar years, plus 75 solar years, equal 2520 solar 
years. How came the prophet to add to the half week of 
times a period equal to the epact of the whole ? He could 
not have known the epact of this period, for the true measures 
of solar and lunar years had not then been ascertained; 
nor indeed could he have known the true interpretation 
of the prophetic times which he announced, — that the 1260 
and 1335 days would be fulfilled on the year-day scale ; and 
that the 1260 years would prove the second half of a great 
historic week of double the length. The correspondence 
of these astronomic measures of the " seven times " with the 
period which prophecy adds to its close, is a confirmation of 
the year-day interpretation, an astronomic seal on its correct- 
ness, and opens the way for a double fulfilment of the final 75 
years, an inclusive and also a subsequent one. 

The addition of 75 years to 1260 years, extending the 
prophetic interval to 1335 years, raises the epact from sixfold 
imperfection to sevenfold completeness : it raises it — 

From 66 weeks of months, plus 60 days, 

To 70 weeks of months, plus 7 weeks of days ; 

And by a second measure (that of the prophetic or calendar 
360-days year), the addition changes the epact — 

From six thousand, six hundred and six days — 
To a thousand weeks. 

In the same way this addition of 75 years, by extending the 
full period from 2520 to 2595 years, raises the epact of the 
whole — 

From seventy-five solar years, 

To seventy-seven solar years, plus twice seven weeks of 
days. 
It may also be noted that the epac'cs in. 133 5 and 2595 years 
are harmonious ; for — 

In 1335 years the epact is seventy weeks of months and 
seven weeks of days ; 



APPENDIX. 57c) 

And in 2595 years it is seventy-seven solar years, and 
twice seven weeks of days ; 

16. The Epact in the remaining Prophetic Times. 

The epact in the 65 years and the 1290 years are equally 
septiform with the preceding ; in the one, seven hundred and 
seven days (101 weeks) ; in the other, twice seven thousand and 
four times seven days (2004 weeks). 

The epact of 2300 years by calendar year measure (360-day 
years) is 33 solar years, and this 33 years is itself a cycle 
of the true solar and lunar years, — a cycle whose epact is 
twelve lunar months, or a lunar year. Thus, according to the 
calendar year measure, the epact of the .Sanctuary cycle equals 
the soli-lunar cycle which comprehends the complete years of 
the earthly life-time of Immanuel. 

17. The Epact> in the full Normal Period of Hu- 
man Life and in the Annus Magnus of the Preces- 
sion of the Equinoxes. 

In our chapter on periodicity in vital phenomena we showed 
that the full normal period of human life is forty weeks plus 
seventy years. The epact in this period is the septiform num- 
ber of seven hundred and seventy days. 

This period of human life bears the same proportion to the 
magnificent cycle of the precession of the equinoxes that a 
solar day does to a solar year, and as the epact of the former 
is 770 days, that of the latter is 770 solar years. 

In conclusion : the simplest and most fundamental natural 
units of time are the solar day, the lunar month, and the solar 
year. 

None of these is an exact multiple of any other. The lesser 
are contained in the greater with fractional remainders. 

These fractional remainders grow to complete 
days, months, and years, and to weeks of these in 
the prophetic periods, and in certain natural cycles funda- 



APPENDIX. 



mentally connected with the measurement of terrestrial time 
on a large scale. 

We previously showed that* the prophetic times are soli- 
lunar cycles ; we now see that they form a septenary series, 
as measured by the conjoint movements of the two glorious 
worlds which rule the orderly succession of terrestrial times 
and seasons. In conclusion we refer the reader to Sec. iii. 
ch. v., where we endeavour to show what that whole is of 
which the prophetic periods and their epact measures are parts. 



Calendar 

OF 

*<Cfie Cuius of tl)t Gtniitts." 

This Calendar 

i. Presents in their order the leading events of the " Times 
of the Gentiles," with their dates b.c. and a.d., together 
with the names and periods of the reigns of an unbroken 
succession of Gentile monarchs, from the beginning of 
the kingdom of Babylon to the present day. 

c. It gives the chronological distance of each reign and 
event from the accession of the first king of Babylon, 
both in solar and lunar years. 

3. It also gives (Part II.) the chronological distances of 

reigns and events from the edicts of Justinian and 
Phocas, and from the era of the Hegira, the papal and 
Mohammedan starting-points ; the former being stated 
in solar, and the latter, in accordance with Moham- 
medan chronology, in lunar years. 

4. It exhibits the fulfilment of the various chronological 

and other prophecies referring to these Gentile " Times." 



APPENDIX. 581 



The date of the commencement of the first of the four great 
monarchies, and thus of the whole " Times of the Gentiles," 
that of the accession of the first king of Babylon? — after the 
overthrow of the Assyrian empire, — is the well-known Era 
of Nabonassar, from which all the reigns of the Babylonian 
kings and other events of history are computed by Babylonian, 
Egyptian, and other ancient chronologers and historians. 

This date, the noon of Thoth L, Nabonassar I., is astrono- 
mically determined as February 26th, B.C. 747, by the records 
of a series of eclipses and planetary positions extending 
through nine centuries, all measured from that point by the 
astronomers who recorded them (notably Ptolemy). 

These eclipses and planetary positions have, during the last 
three centuries, been verified by the labours of modern astrono- 
mers, and thus the exact point of the era of Nabonassar 
precisely ascertained. 

The chronological starting-point of the Babylonian kingdom 
stands out therefore, in the providence of God, amid the mists 
of ancient chronology, as a clear, salient, accurately ascertained 
date, known to a year, to a month, and to a day — the noon of 
February 26th, B.C. 747. 

From this date to the date of the deposition of Romulus 

AUGUSTULUS, THE LAST RULER OF THE WESTERN ROMAN 

Empire, August 22nd, a.d. 476, the interval is 

TWELVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY 
LUNAR YEARS. 

"TIME. TIMES, AND AN HALF TIME." 



APPENDIX. 



<£alntticir 



OF 



"€i)t Cime£ of ti)t <©enttlesu" 



PART I. From the Era of the Rise of the Baby- 
lonian, 
To that of the FALL of the WESTERN 
Roman Empire. 

"TIME, TIMES, AND AN HALF TIME," 

PART II. From the Rise to the Fall of the 

Papal and Mohammedan 
Powers. 

"time, times, and an half time." 



APPENDIX. 583 



PART I. 
CALENDAR OF THE FOUR GREAT EMPIRES, 

BABYLONIAN, PERSIAN, GRECIAN, ROMAN. 
From the era of the accession of NABONASSAR, the com- 
mencement of Babylonian Chronology, 
Feb. 26th, B.C. 747 
[date, Astronomically Determined], 
To the end of the Government of 
ROMULUS AUGUSTULUS, 

AugUSt 22nd, A.D. 476, 

a period of exactly 
Twelve Hundred and Sixty Lunar Years 

["a thousand two hundred and threescore days"] 

jFfot Empire— THE BABYLONIAN. 

First Beast — Lion with eagle's wings. Kingdom of gold. 

Duration — 210 years — seven prophetic months; 

analogous with seven Babylonian months, or 210 days, and 

also one-twelfth of seven times, 

antecedent vision of 

THE GLORY OF JEHOVAH SABAOTH, 

AND OF THE DESOLATIONS OF ISRAEL, 

granted to the prophet Isaiah 

in the year that King Uzziah died, B.C. 757. 

" Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts : 
The whole earth is full of His glory." 

"Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but under- 
stand not ; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the 



534 



APPENDIX. 



heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut 
their eyes ; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with then- 
ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be 
healed. Then said I, Lord, how long ? And He answered, 
Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses 
without man, and the land be utterly desolate, and the Lord 
have removed men far away, and there be a great for- 
saking in the midst of the land. And still there shall 
be a tenth therein that shall return, and there shall be 
wasting; but as a teil tree and as an oak, whose life is in 
them when they are cut down : the holy seed shall be the life 
thereof" (Isa. vi.) 
b.c. 770, 



LUNAR SOLAS. 



747 



741 



Accession of Menahem, king of Israel, who reigned 
10 y. In his days Pul, the first king of Assyria 
named in Scripture, "came against the land/' and 
in the reign of Pekah, Menahem's successor, Tiglath- 
pileser, king of Assyria, invaded it. By these were 
carried captive the Reubenites, Gadites, and half 
tribe of Manasseh (2 Kings xv. 17, 20; 1 Chron. 
v. 3, 25, 26). 

KINGS OF BABYLOX. 

Accession of Nabonassar, Thoth. 1, Feb. 26th. 
From the noon of which day Babylonian chrono- 
logy is reckoned — date accurately determined by 
the verification of a series of astronomical obser- 
vations, including eclipses, recorded by Ptolemy, 
the time of whose occurrence was measured by 
ancient astronomers from this point. 

FIRST CHROXOLOGICAL PROPHECY OF 
ISRAEL'S DESOLA TION [sixty-five years], 
AND PROMISE OF EMMANUEL (given on 
the very spot where Sennacherib's invading army 
afterwards stood : Isa. vii. 2, compare with xxxvi. 

2), "within THREESCORE AND FIVE YEARS shall 



APPENDIX. 



535 



LUNAR SOLAR. 



16 
18 
2 3 
26 



28 



36 



4i 
46 



5i 

57 
58 
62 



J 5 

17 

22 

25 



27 



35 



39 

44 



49 

55 
56 
60 



733 
731 
726 

723 



721 



713 



709 
704 



702 
699, 

693 
692 
688 



Ephraim be broken that it be not a people" 

(Isa. vii.). 

Nadius. Ahaz. Micah. 

Chinzirus and Porus. Hosea. 

Jug^eus. Hezekiah. Nahum. 

Samaria Besieged, 4th year of Hezekiah; 
7th of Hosea. 

Shalmanezer (2 Kings xvii.). 
Mardocempadus. Fall of Samaria. 

{First historical eclipse is mentioned in Annals 
of Sargon, king of Assyria, and by Ptolemy. 
Total eclipse of moon, March 19th, four and 
a half hours before midnight, Babylon, B.C. 721.) 

CAPTIVITY of TEN TRIBES. 

{Second historical eclipse. Lunar eclipse, March 
8th, nh. 56m., B.C. 720, Babylon. — Ptolemy.) 

{Third historical eclipse. Lunar eclipse, Sep* 
tember 1st, loh. 18m., B.C. 720, Babylon. — 
Ptolemy.) 

Sennacherib's Invasion of Judea in 14th year 
of Hezekiah, 713 B.C. (2 Kings xviii., xix. ; 
Isa. xxxvi. 39.) 

" I occupied the town of Samaria, 
and brought into captivity 27,280 
persons. ... I took them to As- 
syria, and instead of them I placed 
men to live there whom my hand 
had conquered." — Annals of Sargon, 
BALDANES, 6mo. king of Assyria (Shalmanezer). 

"Records of Past," vol. vii., Assyrian 
texts.— Bagster. 

From the siege of Samaria by Shal- 
manezer, b.c. 723, to the Papal over- 
throw in the French Revol., 1798 a.d. 
2520 y. or "Seven Times." Bisected by 
period of Justinian. 
Belibus. 

APRONADIUS or ASORDANES. 

Manasseh, b.c. 697. Joel, 

Regibalus. 

Mesesimordachus. 
Interregnum. 



Archianus. 
Interregnum. 

Hagisa, 3od. 

Marudach 



586 



APPENDIX. 



LUNAR. 
7° 
75 


SOLAR. 

68 

72-3 


8 4 
104 


81 

IOI 


127 


123 


H7 


142 


149 


144 


150-1 


146 


i55 


150 

i 



B.C. 

680 
676-5 



667 
647 



625 



606 



604 



602 



598 



asaridinus. 

Completion of exile (of Israel) by 
Esarhaddon (son of Sennacherib, 2 Kings 
xix. 37), and their replacement by heathen 
colonists. Manasseh's captivity in his 
22nd year, B.C. 676-5 (2 Chron. xxxiii. 11, 
Ezra iv. 2), thence seven times, or 
2520 solar YEARS to the 1260th year of 
the Hegira. 

Saosduchinus. 
Chinaladinus. 

Jeremiah begins to prophesy in the 13th year 
of Josiah, B.C. 628. 
Nabopolassar. 

(Fourth historical eclipse. Lunar eclipse, April 

21st, i8h. 22m., B.C. 621.) 
Birth, of Anaximander, B.C. 610: discovered 

obliquity of ecliptic : disciple of Thales. 

FULL DEVELOPMENT OF BABYLONIAN 
EMPIRE. 

Nebuchadnezzar, Nineveh destroyed, 606. 

Prophecies of Jonah and Nahum. 
SEVENTY YEARS CAPTIVITY OF JUDAH 
BEGINS (Jer. xxv. 1), B.C. 605 (in the year be- 
fore the sole reign of Nebuchadnezzar. Clinton). 
Nebuchadnezzar's vision of the Great 

Image (Dan. ii.). 
Complete subjugation of Jehoiakim (2 Kings 
xxiv. 1). Thence 1260 lunar years to 
the era of Hegira, a.d. 622. 
Full commencement of the "times of 
the Gentiles " (2 Kings xxiv. 14). "All 
Jerusalem carried away " captive. Thence 
1260 solar to a.d. 663, commencing date of 
Latin Church, and " seven times" lunar 
to a.d. 184S (2445 solar years =2520 lunar) 
and seven times solar to A.D. 1923 (differ- 



APPENDIX. 



5*7 



LUNAR. 


SOLAR. 


B.C. 


166 


l6l 


587 


193 


lS 7 


561 


195 


I89 


559 


198 


192* 


556 


199 


193 


555 


217 

1 


210 


538 



ence between the last two is the epact of the 
whole, or 75 years). 

19th year of Nebuchadnezzar. The Temple burned, 
10th day of the 5th month (2 Kings xxv. 
compared with Jeremiah Hi. 12). Thence 
an interval of 1260 lunar years to the 
Mohammedan capture and desolation 
of Jerusalem, a.d. 637 (Mosque of Omar). 

Abilmarodachus (Evil Merodach), 37th year of 
Jehoiachim's captivity, B.C. 562, falls within 
the 1st of Evil Merodach (2 Kings xxv. 27). 

Niglissarus (Neriglissar). 

Labosoarchodus. 

Baltasarus (Belshazzar). Daniel's vision of the 
four great beasts in the 1st year of 
Belshazzar (Dan. vii.). 
Daniel's vision of the ram and he goat 

in the 3rd year of Belshazzar (Dan. viii.). 
BELSHAZZAR'S FEAST. " MENE, MENE, TEKEL, 

upharsin " (Dan. v.). 
Darius. 

Belshazzar slain. 
} Darius the Median takes 
the kingdom (Dan. v.). 



Secern* ISmptre.— THE PERSIAN. 

Second Beast — The bear. Kingdom of silver (Dan. ii. 7). 

Duration — 210 lunar years, b.c. 538 to b.c. 334— seven 

months of years. 

In the first year of Darius, 

Daniel's prayer. 

The angel Gabriel sent to reveal to him the 

SEVENTY WEEKS RESTORATION PERIOD, 

extending to the 
Advent of MESSIAH THE PRINCE (Dan. ix.). 



588 



APPENDIX, 



LUNAR. 


SOLAR. 


219 


212 


226 


219 


233 


226 


234 


227 


271 


263 


292 


233 


2 93 


284 


300 

1 


291 

1 



E.C. 

536 



529 



522 
521 



485 



465 
464 

457 



Cyrus. First year of sole government of Cyrus, from 
death of Darius, called in Daniel 3rd of 
Cyrus. 

EDICT OF CYRUS. END OF SEVENTY 

YEARS CAPTIVITY (Ezra i., Dan. x.). 
Cambyses (Dan. xi. 2). 

{Fifth historical eclipse. " In the seventh year 
of Cambyses, which is the 225th year of 
Nabonassar, between the 17th and 18th of 
Phamenoth, at one hour before midnight, the 
moon was eclipsed at Babylon by half the 
diameter on the north." — Ptolemy, July 16th, 
11 p.m., B.C. 523.) 

Smerdis (Dan. xi. 2). 

Darius Hystaspis. Second decree for rebuilding 

of the Temple (Dan. xi. 2 ; Ezra iv. 5, 

v. 6). 

Haggai, Zechariah, Zerubbabel. 

{Sixth historical eclipse, 20th of Darius. Lunar 
eclipse, Nov. 19th, 11.45 at night, B.C. 502.) 



{Seventh historical eclipse, 
Lunar eclipse, April 25th, 
B.c^49i.) 



5 1 st of Darius. 
11.30 at night, 



Xerxes. The . fourth king of Daniel xi. 2, Ezra 
iv. 6. Passage of Hellespont. Battle of 
Salamis, followed solar eclipse verified as 
Oct. 2nd, B.C. 480. — Herodotus ix. 10. 
Birth of Socrates, April or May, 468 B.C. 

Artabanus. 

Artaxerxes Longimanus (Ezra vii.). Seventh 
monarch from Cyrus. 
Issue of command " to restore and to build 
Jerusalem." Latter part of 7th year of 
Artaxerxes. Thence 500 lunar years, or 
6000 lunations, to the Ascension, a.d. 29 ; 
Phasis 1 Nisan, March 21st, B.C. 457. 

COMMENCEMENT OF THE SEVENTY 
WEEKS. Thence 2300 solar years to the 
1260th year of the Hegira. 



APPENDIX. 



5S9 



• LUNAR. 


SOLAR. 


314 


304 


333 


323 


333 


3 2 3 


334 


324 


354 


343 


401 


389 


423 


410 


425 


412 



B.C. 

444 



425 



425 
424 



405 



Nehemiah's commission in 20th year of 
Artaxerxes (Neh. ii.). 

Meton commences his cycle with the new moon 
nearest the summer solstice, B.C. 432. 

(Solar eclipse, August 3rd, 6h. 35m., B.C. 431, 
Athens.) 

Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates. 

End of O. T. Canon. Close of Sacred History. 
Birth of Plato, May, b.c. 429. 
Xerxes II. 

(Lunar eclipse, Oct. 9th, 6h. 45m., total, B.C. 
425, Athens.) 

sogdianus. 
Darius Nothus. 

(Solar eclipse, March 20th, 2oh. 17m., B.C. 424, 
Athens.) 

Grecian defeat. Surrender of Nicias (Thucyd 
vii. 50, 75), eight or nine days after lunai 
eclipse, Aug. 27th, ioh. 15m., total, b.c. 413. 

Temple erected on Mount Gerizim by Ma- 

nasseh, B.C. 408. 

Artaxerxes Mnemon. 

(Lunar eclipse, April 15th, 8h. 50m., B.C. 406, 

total, Athens.) 
(Solar eclipse, September 2nd, 2ih. 12m., B.C. 

404, Athens.) 

Death of Socrates, at end of Thargelion, 
b.c. 399, when he had just entered his 70th 
year. 

Johanan, the high priest, kills his brother 
Jeshua in the Temple, for which the Persian 
governor lays a mulct upon the Jews for 
seven years, B.C. 366. 



359 Ochus. 



338 
336 



Arses. 



(Lunar eclipse, December 22nd, ioh. 6m., B.C. 

383, Athens.) 
(Lunar eclipse, June 18th, 8h. 54m., B.C. 382, 

Athens.) 

(Lunar eclipse, December 12th, ioh. 21m., total 
B.C. 382, Athens.) 

Birth of Demosthenes, in July, B.C. 382. 



Darius Codomannus. 



590 



APPENDIX. 



SHjirtt Empire.— THE GRECIAN. 

Third Beast— Leopard with four heads. Kingdom of brass 
(Dan. ii., vii., viii. 5, xi. 3). 

Duration— from Conquest of Persian Empire, B.C. 334, 

to end of Seleucidae, 

and capture of Jerusalem by Pompey the Roman, B.C. 6$, 

280 LUNAR YEARS,' OR FORTY WEEKS OF YEARS. 



.UNAR, 

425 



438 



446 



SOLAR. 
412 



425 



43 2 



336 



323 



31G 



Alexander the Great. Accession about July. 
First horn of he goat (Dan. viii.). 
B.C. 334, — Crosses Hellespont, marches into 
Asia ; conquers Caria, Syria, Tyre, Egypt, 
Babylon, Susa, Persepolis, and Persian 
Empire ; Parthia, Media, Scythia, and in- 
vades India. Dies at Babylon, in June, 
B.C. 323, age 33. 

(Aristotle opens the Lyceum.) 
Four horns of he goat (Dan. vii. 6, viii. 
8, xi. 4). 
Philip Arid^eus. Cassander. Macedon and 
Greece. 
Seleucus. Babylon, Syria (Dan. 

xi. 5, 6). 
Lysimachus. Thrace and Bi- 

thynia. 
Ptolemy. Egypt ("The king of 
the south," Ptolemy, son of 
Lagus, Dan. xi. 5). 



MACEDON. 

Cassander. 



(Solar eclipse, August 14th, 20I1. 5m. 
Sicily. ) 



B.C. 310, 



Ptolemy Soter (Satrap. Egypt, 
B.C. 323, Dan. xi. 5). 



APPENDIX. 



59* 



KINGS OF SYRIA. 

tSELEUCUS Nicator (Dan. xi. 5, 6). 
Antipater. Era of Seleucidae, Oct. 1, B.C. 312. 
Alexander. 
Demetrius. 

Pyrrhus. Birth of Archimedes, about 287 B.C., at 
Syracuse. 
f Antiochus I., Soter. 

Ptolemy Philadelphus, b.c. 285 
' (Dan. xi. 9). 

FOR 16 YEARS 12 KINGS. 

Antigonus I., Gonatus. 

+ Antiochus II., Theos (Dan. xi. I), 
f Seleucus II., Callinicus (Dan. xi. 7, 8). 
Ptolemy Euergetes, b.c. 247 
(Dan. xi. 7, 8). 
Demetrius II. 
Antigonus II., Doson. 

tSELEucus III., Ceraunus (Dan. xi. 10). 
t Antiochus III., the great (Dan. xi. 
10). 
Ptolemy Philopater, b.c. 222 
(Dan. xi. n, 12). 
Eratosthenes : Astronomer. 



LUNAR. 

45° 


SOLAR. 
436 


B.C. \ 

312 


! 466 
466 
46% 

477 


45 2 
45 2 
454 
462 


296 
296 
294 
286 


433 


468 


280 


485 
486 
502 
5i8 


470 
471 

487 
502 


278 
277 
261 
246 


525 


509 


239 


535 
538 


5i9 

522 


229 
226 


54i 


525 


223 


545 


528 


220 


579 


56i 


187 


587 


569 


179 


59i 


573 


175 



Philip. 



[4I1. 5 m. 



total, B.C. 
B.C. 205 



Perseus 



(Lunar eclipse, March 19th 
219, Mysia.) 

Ptolemy Epiphanes 
(Dan. xi. 14, 17). 
+ Seleucus IV., Philopater (Dan. xi. 20). 
(Solar eclipse, July 6th, 2oh. 38m., B.C. 188. 
Rome.) 

Ptolemy Philometer, b.c. 181 

(Dan. xi. 25). 

f Antiochus Epiphanes (Dan. xi. 21, 

II. Book of Maccabees). (Eighth from 

Seleucus Nicator, first of second seven.) 

Plunders the Temple, and dedicates it 



APPENDIX. 



1 LUNAR. 
1 


SOLAK. 


598 


580 


601 


583 


602 


584 


604 


586 


617 


598 


621 


602 


623 


604 


624 


605 


628 


609 


631 


6l2 


637 


6l8 


638 


6l9 



168 



165 



164 
162 
150 

146 

144 

143 
139 

136 

130 
129 



to Jupiter Olympius. Captures and 
miserably destroys Jerusalem. Jewish 
martyrs. 

Daily sacrifice ceases. 

Judas Maccabeus. 

Asmonean deliverers and princes. 
(Eclipse of moon, June 21st, 8h. 2m., total, B.C. 
168, Macedonia.) 

Cleanses the sanctuary, 25th of ninth 

month, Cisleu, near time of winter 

solstice. Hence the feast of Dedication, 

John x. 22, " and it was winter." 

(Feast of Dedication, A.D. 1879, on Dec. 

10th.) 
From the Maccabean cleansing of the 
sanctuary, B.C. 165, to the First Cru- 
sade for the deliverance of Jerusalem 
and the holy places from Saracenic deso- 
lation (a.d. 1096), 1260 solar years, or 
" time, times, and an half time." 
f Antiochus V. 
+ Demetrius I., Soter. 
f Alexander Balas 

(Jonathan, Asmonean Prince), 
t Demetrius II., Nicator. 
f Antiochus VI. 

(Simon, Asmonean Prince). 
T Diodotus (Trypho). 
+ Antiochus VII. (First of third seven of 
Seleucidee. Marries Cleopatra). 
Hyrcanus I., High Priest. 
(Gen. xlix. 10.) 
f Demetrius II. (restored). 
Hyrcanus conquers the Edomites, and 
compels them all to embrace the Jewish 
religion. From these sprang the Hero- 
dian family. 



APPENDIX. 



593 



LUNAR. 
639 


SOLAR. 
620 


B.C. 

128 


64O 
645 


621 

625 


127 
123 


66l 


64I 


107 


663 


643 


105 


668 


648 


100 


675 
686 
691 


655 
665 
67O 


93 
83 

78 


700 


679 


69 


704 


683 


65 


706 
707 


685 

686 


63 
62 



Hipparchus observes the vernal equinox 
March 22nd, B.C. 128. The star Spica 
(first magnitude) 6° behind the autumnal 
equinox. 

f Alexander Zebin a (impostor). 

t ANTIOCHUS VIII (Grypus). 

KINGS OF JUDEA. 
Aristobulus I., 
Son of Hyrcanus ; first of Asmoneans who 
wore the diadem, and took the name of 
King. Slays his brother Antigonus, and 
is succeeded by his brother Jannseus. 
Alexander Jann^eus. 

(Solar eclipse, July 18th, 22I1., B.C. 104, Rome.) 
(The signs and constellations coincide about 100 

B.C.) 

Birth ©f Julius Caesar, July 12th. 

(The Iron Subjugator.) 
Jannseus conquers Gilead and Moab B.C. 
94 ; crucifies 800 of his rebel subjects, 
B.C. 86. 
f Philip and Demetrius. 
+ Tigranes (King of Armenia). 
Alexandra, 
Widow of Jannseus, conciliates the Pharisees. 
Dies, B.C. 70. 

t Antiochus IX., Asiaticus. 
(21st and last of Seleucidse.) 
/Hyrcanus II., son of Alexandra. Seizes 
\ crown ; forced to resign it after 3 months to 
J his younger brother Aristobulus. 
V Aristobulus II. 

(POMPEY CONQUERS SYRIA. END OF SELEUCIDiE, B.C. 65.) 

Cesar aedile, B.C. 65. 

Hyrcanus II. 
POMPEY (ROMAN) having conquered 
Syria takes Jerusalem, after a siege 
of three months, on day of a fast in 
Q Q 



594 



APPENDIX, 



December, B.C. 6$. Deposes Aristo- 

bulus and makes Hyrcanus king. 
Duration of First Three Empires — 707 

lunar years. 
Birth of Augustus (Caesar) September 

23rd, B.C. 63. Julius Caesar elected 

Pontifex Maximus. 
(Lunar eclipse, Oct. 27th, 6h. 22m., total, B.C. 

63, Rome.) 

Julius Caesar subdues the western tribes of 
Gaul, B.C. 56. Passes the Rhine, lands 
in Britain, B.C. 55. Second expedition 
of Caesar into Britain, B.C. 54; returns 
and winters in Syria, crosses Rubicon, 
follows Pompey to Brundusium, con- 
quers Afranius in Spain, B.C. 49. 

Caesar as Pontifex Maximus reforms the 
Calendar (inserts 67-f23=90d. in year 
46 B.C. Introduces yulian year)* (The 
month Quintilis named Julius, B.C. 44.) 
Julius Caesar slain March 15th, B.C. 44. 
Age 56. 
Antigonus. Last of Asmonean princes. 
(Seventh from Hyrcanus I.) 

Herod and Sosius besiege Jerusalem, 
and after half a year's siege take it in 
December, B.C. 38. 
(Last Seventy Years of the 490 years to 
Messiah begin, B.C. 37). 

Herod the Great (Idumean). 37. 

Murders Hyrcanus ; by his instigation 
Antigonus is put to death at Rome. 

The sceptre thus departs from Judah (Gen. 
xlix. 10) in preparation for the imme- 
diate Advent of Shiloh. 

Herod rebuilds the Temple. 

The Temple of Janus shut (cessation 
of war) ; shut a second time, B. c. 25. 



LUNAR. 


SOLAR. 


B.C. 


715 


693 


55 


724 


702 


46 


726 


704 


44 


73° 


708 


40 


732 


710 


38 


733 


711 


37 


74i 


719 


29 



APPENDIX. 



595 



jfottrtij lEmptte— THE ROMAN. 

Fourth Beast — " dreadful and terrible and strong exceedingly." 
Kingdom of iron. 



74; 



765 



777 



7S5 



SOLAR. 
720 
721 



742 



754 



761 



EMPERORS. 

27 I Augustus Cesar. 

(Caesar named Augustus, B.C. 27. The Anni 
Augustani computed at Rome from Jan. 1, 
B.C. 27. From E. Nab. to this point, two 
prophetic "times" — 360+360 = 720 years of 
" seven times.") 
COMMENCEMENT OF THIRD PROPHETIC 
" TIME." 

(Three conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in 
the constellation Pisces, near the first point of 
Aries, B.C. 7. In spring of B.C. 6, the planet 
Mars came to same spot.) 

(B.C. 6 is first year of 40th lunar cycle from 
Nab. era. Epact in 40 cycles 280 months, or 
forty weeks of months.) 

The Nativity (Luke ii.). 

MESSIAH THE PRINCE. 

Death of Herod a little before the Pass- 
over of B.C. 4 (Matt. ii. 19). 
(Date fixed by lunar eclipse in the night between 
March 12th and 13th, beginning at ih. 48m., 
and ending at 4b.. 12m. Ideler. Recorded by 
Josephus.) 

Jesus goes up to Jerusalem at the feast of 
Passover when He is twelve years of 
age. Found ' ' in the temple sitting in 
the midst of the doctors, both hearing 
them and asking them questions" (Luke 
ii. 46). 
14 Tiberius (Luke xx. 22-25). 

Death of Augustas, Aug. 19th 

(Tacitus, Annals, Book I., mentions an eclipse 
of the moon soon after the death of Augustus. 
Verified as lunar eclipse Sept. 26th, 17b. 15m., 
total, a,d. 14.) 



596 



APPENDIX. 



SOLAR. A.D. 



796 

800 



772 
776 



25 

29 



805 



808 



813 



781 

784 
788 



34 



37 



41 



Tiberius Pontifex Maximus, March 10th, 

A.D. 15. 
Ministry of John the Baptist (Luke 
iii.). 
Baptism and Ministry of Messiah from 
Autumn of A.D. 25 (Luke iii. 23). 
N. Era, 777 (70th year of Tiberius). 

Death of Messiah. Day of Passover, 
March 18th. " About the ninth hour," or 
at 3 p.m. Full Moon, 9I1. 16 m. p.m. 
(Johnxix. 28), (77th day of year), Friday. 
Burial, Friday evening. 
Sabbath, March 19th, in the grave. " That 
sabbath was an high day" (John xix. 31). 
Resurrection and Ascension of Messiah 
(Matt, xxviii. ). 
Resurrection, March 20th. First 
Day of Week, Day of Wave Sheaf. 
Vernal Equinox. Sun in Aries. 
Ascension, 40 days subsequently, April 
28-29 (Acts i. 3, 9). 
Foundation of the Church. 
Commencement of The Dispensation of the 
Spirit (Acts ii.). 
The Gospel published in Judea, Samaria, and 
Antioch. 

END OF SEVENTY WEEKS. 
The Gospel preached to the Gentiles. 

Labours of the Apostle Paul (Acts ix. 
to xxviii.). 
Caligula. Assassination of Caligula, Jan. 24th, 415 
age 29. Nero born. 
Herod Agrippa, king of Galilee. 
Claudius (Acts xi. 28 ; xxviii. 2). 

Birth of Titus, Dec. 30th, 41. Herod 
Agrippa, king of all Palestine. 



APPENDIX. 



597 



LUNAR. 


SOLAR, 


A.D. 


826 


80I 


54 


838 


813 


66 


839 


8l4 


67 


840 


815 


68 


841 


8l6 


69 

j 

1 



Death of Herod Agrippa. All Palestine 
a Roman province, a.d. 44. 

Cuspius Fadus, Procurator, 44. Clau- 
dius Felix, sole Procurator of Judea, 
a.d. 53. 
Nero (Acts xxv. 8, 12 ; xxvii. 24). Claudius 
poisoned by Agrippina that her son 
Nero may succeed, Oct. 13th, 54. 

Festus, Procurator of Judea, A.D. 55. 

Albinus, Procurator of Judea, A.D. 62. 

Great fire at Rome ; Christians falsely accused 
of having caused it, and suffer cruel perse- 
cutions. This first persecution lasted four 
years. 

Jewish war begins, May, 66. Christians 
flee from Jerusalem to Pella (Matt. xxiv.). 
Vespasian conducts the Jewish war. Enter- 
ing Galilee with his army takes Jotapata, 
after 47 d. siege, on 1st of Panemus or 
Thamuz, 67. Joppa and Tiberias then 
surrender. Josephus taken prisoner at 
Jotapata. 
Galea. Nero kills himself, June 9th, 68; age 
30 y. 5 m. 26 d. (840 lunar years = £ of 
2520 y., or " seven times " lunar). 
Vespasian proceeds with the Jewish war; 
about Feb. 68 enters Gadara, and Jericho 
about May. 
Otho. Galba slain, Jan. 15 ; age 73. 
Vitellius. Proclaimed emperor by German legions. 

Disgraced by the grossest sensuality. 
Vespasian. Assumes empire, July 1, 69. Conquers 
Vitellius, who is beheaded, Dec. 21 ; 
age 55- 
Vespasian commits conduct of Jewish 
war to his son Titus. Jerusalem a 
prey to fierce intestine factions. 



59 3 



APPENDIX. 



Titus marches from Alexandria to Jeru- 
salem, arriving there a little before 
the Passover. Besieges the city 
nearly five months. Appalling suffer- 
ings of Jews. Encloses Jerusalem on 
every side (Luke xix. 41-44; xxi, 
20, 24). Daily sacrifice ceased, 17th 
Panemus, Friday, 13th July. 

Temple burned on the 10th day of 
the 5th month (Louis or Ab), August 
4-5. Jewish war lasted 4y. 4 m.; 
1,100,000 Jews perish in the siege of 
Jerusalem ; 97,000 captives. 

Triumph of Vespasian and Titus at 
Rome (commemorated by Arch of 
Titus at Rome). 
(Lunar eclipse, Rome, March 4th, Sh. 32m., A.D. 

71, eclipsed at setting ; and 15 days after this 

the sun eclipsed at 9 in the morning.) 

Titus. Death of Vespasian, June 23rd, age 69. 

Pompeii and Heculaneum destro5*ed by an erup- 
tion of Mount Vesuvius, Aug. 23rd. 
Rome afflicted by a calamitous fire, followed by 
a pestilence, So. 

Domitian. Death of Titus (attributed to poison), 
September 13th; age 40. Second 
persecution of the Christian Church. 
Gnosticism. 
Xerva. Domitian slain on account of his barbarities, 
Sept. 18th, 96; age 45. Death of 
Nerva, Jan. 25th, 98 ; age 72. 
(Lunar eclipse March 21st, at sin afternoon, A.D. 
98. — "Chrono. Astrolabe," Lindsay.) 

Trajan. Bithynian persecutions under Pliny. 

Trajan, first emperor who enacts penal 
laws against the Christians. 

Death of the Apostle John. Martyr- 
dom of Ignatius by Trajan, 1 15. 
Close of N. T. Canon. 



LUNAR. 

842 


SOLAR. 
817 


A.D. 

70 


843 


8l8 


71 


852 


826 


79 


854 


828 


81 


869 


843 


96 


871 


845 


98 



APPENDIX. 



599 



891 



864 



A.D. 

117 



909 



912 



936 



95 6 



882 



908 



927 



135 



138 



181 



180 



Hadrian. Proclaimed Aug. nth, 117. Personally 
surveys all the provinces of the em- 
pire. Visits Syria, and on the ruins 
of Jerusalem builds ^Elia Capito- 
LINA, in which he dedicates a temple 
to Jupiter. 
The aphelion of Mercury observed by Theon, 
July 5th, 131. 

Jewish rebellion under Barchoche- 
bas, the false Messiah, 132. Perse- 
cutes Christians. Jewish war with 
Romans lasts from the spring of 132 
to August, 135 (3 years and a half) ; 
985 towns and villages and 580,000 
Jews destroyed. Jews forbidden to 
approach Jerusalem ; a new city built 
on its foundations and colonized by 
foreigners. 
888 a.U.c. Jewish Desolation Complete. 

Ptolemy (Claudius), astronomer, geographer, and 
chronologer, author of the Almagest. The 
eclipses he records extend through nine cen- 
turies. Foundatioii of chronology. 

Antoninus Pius. Death of Hadrian, July 10th, 138 ; 
reigned 2oy. 10 m. 30 d. Antoninus 
enacts that no Christian should be 
persecuted as such, 157. Died Mar. 
7th, 161. 

Marcus Aurelius (the philosopher), author of a sys- 
tematic persecution. Justin Martyr's 
Apology. Martyrdom of Polycarp, 
167. Pestilence rages several years. 

Commodus. Death of Marcus, Mar. 17th, 180. 
Reigned, 19 y. ; age 58y. 10m. 21 d. 
Commodus given to dissolute plea- 
sures. 

Increasing ascendency of Hierarchical Aristo 

cracy in the Church. 
Montanism, 188. 



6 oo 



APPENDIX. 



LUNAR. 
969 


SOLAR. 
940 


A.D. 

193 


969 


940 


193 


969 


940 


193 


988 


958 


211 


994 


964 


217 


995 


965 


218 


999 


969 


222 


1012 


982 


235 


1016 


985 


238 


1016 


985 


238 


1016 


985 


238 



Pertinax. Murdered by Praetorians, March 28th, 

193- 

Didius Julianus. Buys the empire. Slain, June 

1st, 193. 
Septimus Severus. 

Early aggression of Church of Rome. Victor 
excommunicates the churches of Asia Minor. 
Irenseus. Tertullian. 

Edict prohibiting Christianity. Sixth 

persecution, 201. 

Caracalla. Oppressive taxation. Massacre at 
Alexandria by Caracalla, 215. Cara- 
calla assassinated near Edesa, April 
8th, 217 ; age 29. 

Macrinus. Succeeds, April nth, 217. Beheaded, 
218 ; age 54. 

Elagabalus. A youth of 17, high priest of Temple 
at Emesa. Superstitious and profli- 
gate. Slain by Praetorians, Jan., 222 ; 
age 21. 
Origen at Alexandria. 

Alexander Severus. In his 14th year, prudently 

guided by his mother, who is created 

Augusta, wages war with the Persians. 

Murdered, Feb., 235 ; age 28. 

The Canon Paschalis of Hippolytus begins, 222. 

Maximin. Defeats the Germans. His ferocious 
tyranny in Sirmium excites universal 
horror. Partial persecution of Chris- 
tians. Seventh persecution. 

The Gordians. The Gordians proclaimed in Africa; 
defeated and slain. 
Toleration of the Church general. 

Maximus and Balbinus. Elected by the Senate, 
and murdered by the Praetorians. 

Gordian III. Age 13, proclaimed emperor. Mur- 
dered ; age 19, 244. 



APPENDIX. 



60 1 



LUNAR. 
I022 


SOLAK. 
991 


A.D. 

244 


I027 


996 


249 


1029 


998 


251 


1032 


1001 


254 


1032 


IOOI 


254 


IO38 


T007 


260 


1047 


1015 


268 


1049 


1017 


270 



Philip the Arabian. Openly shows favour to 

Christians. Makes peace with Sapor, 

246. 

Origen, aged 60, writes cont. Celsum. 
Bishops now possess great and increasing in- 
fluence. 

Decius. Eighth persecution ; many apostatize, 
Persian and Gothic invasions. 
Origen suffers imprisonment and torture, 250. 
Gallus. Appointed in association with Hostilianus, 
son of Decius. Ninth persecution. 
A pestilence begins which lasts fifteen 
years. 
Rise of monachism. Death of Origen, in his 
69th year. 

^Emilanus. Slain by his soldiers at Spoletum. 

Valerian. Cyprian teaches that the Bishop of 
Rome is the successor of St. Peter, 
and that the Church of Rome is 
entitled to precedence from import- 
ance of the city, but not in point of 
jurisdiction. 

Persecution. Stephen, bishop of Rome, put to 
death. Many Christians sent to the mines. 

Gallienus. Famine and pestilence ; diminution 
of the human species. 
Edict of Toleration. Christianity be- 
comes for the first time a *' religio 
licita " — a lawful method of worship. 

Claudius. Gallienus slain, March, 268, age 50. 
Claudius overthrows the Goths, who, 
to the number of 320,000, had occu- 
pied Illyricum and Macedonia. 

Hierarchical pretensions on the increase. 
Celibacy in high esteem. 

Quintillus. Brother of Claudius, assumes empire, 

and in 17 days puts an end to his 

life. 



6o2 



APPENDIX. 



LUNAR. 
I049 


SOLAR. 
IOI7 


A.D. 

270 


1054 


1022 


275 


1055 


1023 


276 


1055 


1023 


276 


I06l 


IO29 


282 


I06l 


IO29 


282 


I06l 


1029 


282 


1063 


IO3I 


284 


IO65 


!033 


286 


1075 


1043 


296 


IO83 


1005 


303 



Aurelian. Makes peace with Goths and Vandals, 
unfriendly to Christianity ; about to 
commence a persecution of Christians 
when he died, slain by the treachery 
of his notary ; age 61. 

Interregnum of six months, ending Sept. 25th, 275. 

Tacitus. Elected by senate, Sept. 25th. Dies while 
conducting an expedition against the 
Goths. 

Florianus. Brother of Tacitus. Killed by soldiers 
at Tarsus. 

Probus. Proclaimed emperor by the army, and 
confirmed by Senate in spring of 276. 
Killed in a mutiny of army, October, 
282 ; age 50. 

CARUS. Subdued Sarmatians, slew 16,000 and 
captured 20,000 ; gives title of Caesar 
to each of his sons, Carinus and 
Numerianus. Dies in November, 
283 ; age 61. 

Carinus. Encounters Diocletian, who is advancing 
into Europe. 

NUMERIANUS. Assassinated by his father-in-law, 
Aper. 
Fifth Seal. Martyrs slain under 
Pagan Rome. 

Diocletian. Proclaimed emperor, Sept. 17th, 284. 
Era of Diocletian, or of Martyrs, 
dates from 284. 

Maximinian. Is associated by Diocletian with hinu 
self as joint emperor. Origenist con- 
troversy. Beginning of divisions in 
the Christian Church. 1260 lima* 
years from laying Foundations of 
Samaria, B.C. 926. 
Diocletian's systematic persecution of 
Christians commences with the publi* 



APPENDIX-. 



603 



cation of his edict, at Nicomedia, 
on the 24th Feb., 303. This was the 
fiercest persecution the Church had 
endured, the "ten days " tribulation. 
It lasted ten years, and was the tenth 
persecution. 

1085 1052 305 Constantius Chlorus. Diocletian abdicates at 

Nicomedia, May 1st, 305; and on 
same day Maximinian abdicates at 
Milan, and is succeeded by Constan- 
tius as Augustus. 

1086 1053 306 Constantine the Great. Constantius, after a 

victory over the Picts, died at York. 
His son, Constantine the Great, pro- 
claimed Augustus by the army, 25 th 
July, 306. 

1092 1059 312 Conversion of Constantine. Indictions 

begin Sept. 1st, 312. 

Battle of Milvian Bridge, Oct. 28, 312. 

1093 1060 313 Licinius's Edict of Toleration, 

13th Jan., 313. Death of Diocletian, 



FALL OF PAGAN ROMAN EMPIRE. 

Constantinople Founded, 324. 

Rise of Arianism, a.d. 317, occasions 
council of Nice. Second stage in 
division of Christendom. 1260 calen- 
dar years after Foundation of Samaria, 
B.C. 926. 

(Analogous with twofold division of 
Tribes, — Samaria and Jerusalem.) 

Council of Nice, 325 . Attended by 3 1 8 
bishops. (First of the 21 (Ecumeni- 
cal or General Councils.) Dedication 
of Constantinople, 330. Arianism, 
331. 



504 



APPENDIX. 



LUNAR. 
IIl8 


SOLAR. 
IO84 


A.D. 

337 


IIlS 


IO84 


337 


I 1 18 


IO84 


337 


1142 


IIOS 


361 


I 144 


IIIO 


363 


1144 


IIIO 


363 


1145 


1111 


364 



Constantine II. Council of Tyre, Jerusalem, 
Arian, A.D. 335. 1260 solar years 
after Foundation of Samaria, B.C. 
926. 
Arian council of Constantinople, 336. 
Division of Christendom. The 
first controversial war. (The Church 
henceforth divided against itself.) 

CONSTANS. 

Eusebius writes the life of Constantine. 

Constantius. Three sons of Constantine, divide 
the empire between them. 
The Cathedral of St. Sophia is dedicated at 
Constantinople, 360. 

One-half the inhabitants of the Roman 
Empire profess Christianity, which is 
now the religion of the State. 
Julian. Openly renounces Christianity, and endea- 
vours to re-establish Paganism. Re- 
stores heathen sacrifices. 

Julian attempts to re-build the Temple 

at Jerusalem. 

The Jews assist. Undertaking abandoned on 
account of fire bursting forth from foundations. 
Julian wounded in battle, June 26th ; expires 
at midnight, in his 32nd year, a.d. 363. 

Jovian. Proclaimed emperor, June 27th. Restores 

privileges of the Church ; recalls 

banished bishops. Dies Feb. 17th, 

364. 
Valentinian. Makes his brother Valens emperor 
of the East, and takes the West 
himself. 

FINAL DIVISION OF EASTERN AND 

WESTERN EMPIRES. 

(Lunar eclipse Nov. 25th, 15I1. 24m., total, a.d. 
364, Alexandria.— Theon, in Commentary on 
the Almagest of Ptolemy.) 



APPENDIX. 



605 



Gratian. Valentinian dies, Nov. 17th, 357; age 55. 
Succeeded by his son Gratian, who is 
the first emperor to renounce the 
heathen title Pontifex Maximus (a 
title afterwards assumed by the Popes). 
Socrates, historian. 

Valentinian II. Younger brother of Gratian, 
associated with him. 
Ambrose, bishop of Milan. 
Earlier trumpets (Rev. viii.). Over- 
throw of Roman Empire. 

HONORIUS. Removal of seat of government from 
Rome to Ravenna. Revolt of Goths. 
Alaric commenced his ravages in 
Greece, 395 ; and in Italy, 402. 
Sack of Rome by Alaric, Aug. 
24th, 410. Augustine. 

Innocent I., bishop of Rome requires all the 
Western Churches to conform to the customs 
of the Church of Rome, 416. 

Valentinian III. 

Enacts that all bishops of the Western Empire 
obey the Bishop of Rome. 

Killed by Maximus for his adultery. 

Death of Attila, 453. 

Maximus. Vandals under Genseric plunder Rome. 

Patricius, or Succoth (St. Patrick), 

454- 
Genseric carries away the sacred vessels which 
Titus had brought from Jerusalem, about 
June 13-26, 455. 

Avitus. The Visigoths establish their dominion in 
Spain. 

Majorianus. Assassinated, Aug. 7th, 461, by Rici- 
mer, who places Severus on throne, 
but exercises imperial power him- 
self. 

Severus. Proclaimed at Ravenna, 19th Nov., 461. 

Anthemius. Inaugurated at Rome, 12th April, 467. 



CNAR. 


SOLAR. 


A.D. 


157 


1122 


375 


157 


1122 


375 


*77 


1 142 


395 


*93 


1157 


410 


208 


1172 


425 


2 39 


I202 


455 


240 


I2©3 


456 


241 


1204 


457 


245 


I208 


461 


252 


1214 


467 



6o6 



APPENDIX. 



LUNAR. 
1257 


SOLAR. 
1219 


A.D. 

472 


1259 

I2 59l 


1221 
1222 


474 

475 


1260 


1222J 


476 



Olybrius. Advance of Patriarchate, Olybrius 
reigned 7 months. Died Oct. 23rd, 
472. 
Julius Nepos. Elevation, June 24th, 474. 
Romulus Augustulus. Orestes, the patrician, 
enters Ravenna with an army and 
drives out Nepos, who flies to Dal- 
matia, 28th Aug., 475. 
Orestes proclaimed his son Romulus 
emperor at Ravenna, Oct. 31st, 475. 
Odoacer at the head of the Heruli 
invades Italy; overthrows Orestes, 
who is slain at Placentia. 
Romulus Augustulus is banished. 
Odoacer makes himself King o'c 
Italy, fixing his seat at Ravenna. 
The last Augustus reigned 10 mths. j 
from Oct. 31st, 475, to 22nd Aug., 
to Aug. 22. 476. (" Fasti Romani," Clinton.) 



END OF WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE. 

Period from Beginning of Kingdom of Babylon, 
to Fall of Western Rome, — 

From the Era of Nabonassar, February 2?th, 747 B.C., 

To the Fall of Augustulus, August 22nd, 476 a.d., 

there elapsed 1222 solar years and six months, 

or 

TWELVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY LUNAR YEARS. 

"time, times, and an half time." 

1222 solar years 6 months =446,503 days. 

1260 lunar years, or 15,120 lunations = 446, 502 \ days 



FROM THE RISE TO THE FALL OF THE PAPAL POWER; 
1260 YEARS, IN SOLAR, CALENDAR AND LUNAR FORMS, 

Reckoned from the Edicts of Justinian and Phocas; and the accession of Gregory the Great- 



600 



A.C 
AD. 184-9 


). 1866-70 - 

1848-9 ----- 

1830— 


— 1 








1774 

1/55- 


























































































A D.R07 




A. P. 533 


A.D.530 







APPENDIX, 60? 



Calendar 

OF 

€€ €i)t Cimt* of tfie Gentiles." 



P A R.T II., Comprising : 

THE EISE 5 CULMINATION, AND DECAY OP THE 
PAPAL AND MOHAMMEDAN POWEES. 

1. The birth of Mohammed, and the accession of Gregory 
the Great, towards the end of the sixth century, mark 
the commencement of the second part of the Times of 
the Gentiles. Of the second of these events, Arch- 
bishop Trench says in his " Mediaeval Church History " 
(p. 14) : " My conviction is that we should articulate 
history more justly, if we affirmed that as ancient history 
it closed, and as mediaeval history it began, with the 
Po?iiificate of Gregory the Great. In him, the last of the 

Edict and letters of the Emperor Justinian, constituting the 
Bishop of Rome head of all the Churches of Christendom : — 

* f Imp. Justinia v n. A. Constantinopolitis. 

" Cum Salvatorem et Dominum omnium Jesum Cfiristum verum Deum 
nostrum colamus per omnia, studemus etiam (quatenus datum est humanse 
menti assequi) imitari ejus condescensionem seu demissionem. Etenim 
cum quosdam invenerimus morbo atque insania detentos impiorum 
Nestorii et Eutychetis, Dei et sanctse catholicse et apostolicse ecclesioe 
hostium, nempe qui detrectabant sanctam gloriosam semper Virginem 
Mariam Theotocon sive Deiparam appellare proprie et secundum veritatem : 
illos festinavimus quse sit recta Christianorum fides edocere. Nam hi 
incurabiles cum sint, celantes errorem suum passim circumeunt (sicut 
didicimus) et simpliciorum animos exturbant et scandalizant, ea astruentes 
quae sunt sanctse catholicse ecclesiae contraria. Necessarium igitur esse 
putavimus, tarn hssreticorum vaniloquia et mendacia dissipare, quam 
omnibus insinuare, quomodo aut sentiat sancta Dei et catholica et 



6o3 APPENDIX. 



Latin fathers, the first, in our modern sense of the word, 
of the Popes, we bid adieu to the old Greek and Roman 
culture and literature and habits of thought, as the pre- 
dominant and ruling forces of the world. The ancient 
world still lives on, . . . but another order of things 
is shaping itself and Gregory the Great, standing at the 
meeting place of the old and new, does more than any other 
to set the Church forward upon the new lines on which 
henceforth it must travel to constitute a Latin Christian- 



apostolica ecclesia, aut praedicent sanctissimi ejus sacerdotes ; quos et nos 
sequuti, manifesta constituimus ea quae fidei nostrae sunt ; non quidem 
innovantes fidem (quod absit) sed coarguantes eorum insaniam qui eadem 
cum impiis haereticis sentiunt. Quod quidem et nos in nostri imperii 
primordiis pridem satagentes cunctis fecimus manifestum." 

" In the remainder of the edict, the Emperor gives a statement 
of his own faith, and denounces anathemas against Nestorius, 
Eutyches, and Apollinarius, and their followers. The edict is 
dated on the ides of March, 533. The same edict was ad- 
dressed to twelve other cities of the empire, among which 
were Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Ephesus." 

" Upon the promulgation of this edict, Justinian addressed an 
epistle to the Pope, as the acknowledged head of all the holy- 
churches, which was transmitted by the hands of Demetrius 
and Hypatius, two bishops. From this epistle I quote the 
following extracts : — " 

"Victor Justinianus, pius, felix, inclytus,triumphator, semper Augustus, 
Joanni sanctissimo Archiepiscopo almae Urbis Romse et Patriarchae. 

*' Reddentes honorem apostolicse sedi, et vestrae sanctitati (quod semper 
nobis in voto et fuit et est), et ut decet patrem honorantes vestram beatitudi- 
nem, omnia quae ad ecclesiarum statum pertinent festinavimus ad notitiam 
deferre vestrae sanctitatis ; quoniam semper nobis fuit magnum studium, 
unitatem vestrae apostolicae sedis, et statum sanctarum Dei ecclesiarum 
custodire, qui hactenus obtinet, et incommote permanet, nulla intercedente 
contrarietate. Ideoque omnes sacerdotes universi Orientalis tractus et sub- 
jicere et unire sedi vestrae sanctitatis properavimus. In prsesenti ergo quae 
commota sunt (quamvis manifesta et indubitata sint et secundum apostolicae 



APPENDIX. 609 

ity, with distinctive features of its own, such as broadly 

separate it from Greek" 

The accession of this pontiff, and the birth of Mohammed, 

the founder of the great system of false religion in the East, 

are separated from the era of Nabonassar by 1335 calendar, 

and 1335 solar years. 

1335 calendar years are 13 16 solar : from the era of 
Nabonassar, b.c. 747, to the birth of Mohammed, a.d. 570, 
is this period. 



vestrae sedis doctrinam ab omnibus semper sacerdotibus firme custodita et 
prsedicata) necessarium duximus, ut ad notitiam vestrae sanctitatis. per- 
veniant. Nee enim patimur quicquam, quod ad ecclesiarum statum per- 
tinet, quamvis manifestum et indubitatum sit, quod movetur, ut non etiam 
vestrae innotescat sanctitati quae caput est omnium sanctarum ecclesiarum. 
Per omnia enim (ut dictum est) properamus honorem et auctoritatem 
crescere vestrae sedis." 

" The epistle next states the circumstance of certain men 
having maintained heretical doctrines respecting the person of 
Christ, and it then contains a statement of the faith of the 
Church and of the Emperor himself on this point, and it con- 
cludes as follows : — " 

" Suscipimus autem sancta quatuor concilia : id est, trecentorum decern 
et octo sanctorum patrum, qui in Nicaena urbe congregati sunt : et centum 
quinquaginta sanctorum patrum qui in hac regia urbe convenerunt : et sanc- 
torum patrum qui in Epheso primo congregati sunt, et sanctorum patrum 
qui in Chalcedone convenerunt : sicut vestra apostolica sedes docet atque 
praedicat. Omnes ergo sacerdotes sequentes doctrinam apostolicae sedis 
vestrae ita credunt et confitentur et praedicant. 

"Unde properavimus hoc ad notitiam deferre vestrae sanctitatis per 
Hypatium et Demetrium, beatissimos episcopos, ut nee vestram sanctitatem 
lateat, quae et a quibusdam paucis monachis male et Judaice secundum 
Nestorii perfidiam denegata sunt. Petimus ergo vestrum paternum affec- 
tum; ut vestris ad nos destinatis literis, et ad sanctissimum episcopum 
hujus almae urbis, et patriareham vestrum fratrem (quoniam et ipse per 
eosdem scripsit ad vestram sanctitatem, festinans in omnibus sedem 
sequi apostolicam beatitudinis vestrae), manifestum nobis faciatis, quod 
.omnes qui praedicta recte confitentur, suscipit vestra sanctitas, et eorum qui 

R R 



II' 



6io APPENDIX. 



From the era of Nabonassar, 1335 solar years terminate in 
A.D. 589, — the year before the accession of Gregory the Great. 

If the prophetic period #/" 1335 years should prove to begin 
with this point, and to be reckoned in solar years, the whole 
extent of the Times of the Gentiles will be 1335 years doubled, 
aiid the accession of Gregory the Grmt will be its bisection. 

2. The edicts of Justinian and Phocas, constituting the Bishop 
of Rome head of all the Churches of Christendom, are 
the limits of the 74-5 years interval which comprises 



Judaice ausi sint rectam denegare fidem, condemnat perfidiam. Plus enim 
ita circa vos omnium amor, et vestrae sedis crescet auctoritas ; et quae ad 
vos est unitas sanctarum ecclesiarum inturbata servabitur, quando per vos 
didicerint omnes beatissimi episcopi eorum, quae ad vos relata sunt, 
sinceram vestrae sanctitatis doctrinam. Petimus autem vestram beatitudinem 
orare pro nobis, et Dei nobis adquirere providentiam." 

"The above epistle was dated at least as early as the 25th 
of March, 533 ; for in his letter to the Archbishop of Con- 
stantinople, which bears that date, the Emperor mentions his 
having already written to the Pope." 

u The reply of Pope John to the above memorable epistle is 
dated the 24th March, 534; and the following are extracts 
from it : " 

" Gloriosissimo et clementissimo filio Justiniano Augusto, 
"Johannes Episcopus Urbis Romas. 
" Inter claras sapientise ac mansuetudinis vestrae laudes, Christianissime 
principum, puriore luce tanquam aliquod sydus irradiat, quod amore fidei, 
quod charitatis studio edocti ecclesiasticis disciplinis, Romanae sedis rever- 
entiam conservatis, et ei cuncta subjicitis, et ad ejus deducitis unitatem, ad 
cujus auctorem, hoc est apostolorum primum, Domino loquente prse- 
ceptum est, Pasce oves meas : Quam esse omnium vere ecclesiarum caput, 
et patrum regulae et principum statuta declarant, et pietatis vestrae rever- 
endissimi testantur affatus." 

" Proinde serenitatis vestrae apices, per Hypatium atque Demetrium, 
sanctissimos viros, fratres et coepiscopos meos, reverentia consueta suscepi- 
mus : quorum etiam relatione comperimus, quod fidelibus populis propo- 



"SEVEN TIMES" WITH THE ADDED 75 YEARS; 

Reckoned 
I .from Nabonassar ; 2, from Nebuchadnezzar. 

Nabonassar Era. BC. 747 __ 

Capt. Israel. 



Nebuchadnezzar 
Capt.Judah. 



B.C. 598. 



END West. Rom. Emp. Aug. 22.476 1260 Lunar 
~ 1260 Solar- 
Gregory the Great. 589-590, 1335 Sol.-*. 

Vitelian. Lateinos. 663 1260 Sol. Nebr, 



Louis XVI. F.Rwol. 
Napoleon. 



Pius IX{ 



1774 2520 Solar. 

1804 < 

l843-9L_2520 + 75Y_rr.^ 
1878-9 ni: 



o = 
c» m 
2.3 



mmm 



75 Y. 



150 Y. 



Bisection ? 



-- 2520 Solar Y. 
> 2520 Solar Y. 



30 Y. 

45Y.J 7 EktoM& 



30Y. 
[45Y. 



75 Y. ? 



J 



APPENDIX. 61 1 



nearly the whole of the reign of Justinian, together with 
the period and pontificate of Gregory the Great, and those 
of Boniface III., — the era of the establishment of the Papacy. 

3. The commencing point in the Mohammedan calendar is 

the so-called flight of Mohammed, or his reception at 
Medina as Prophet and Prince, a.d. 622. 
This date, called the era of the Hegira, is the new moon of 
July 16, a.d. 622. 

4. Reckoning from the 74-5 years interval of the establishment 

suistis edictum amore fidei pro submovenda haereticorum intentione, secun* 
dum apostolicam doctrinam, fratrum et coepiscoporum nostrorum inter- 
veniente consensu. Quod, quia apostolicse doctrinae convenit, nostra 
auctoritate confirmamus," 

" Upon the same occasion Justinian also addressed a letter 
to the Patriarch of Constantinople, of which I shall give the 
first paragraph." 

" Idem imperat. Epiphanio sanctissimo et beatissimo Archiepiscopo 
Regiae hujus Urbis et CEcumenico Patriarchae; 

" Cognoscere volentes tuam sanctitatem ea omnia quae ad ecclesiasticum 
spectant statum : necessarium duximus, hisce ad earn uti divinis compendiis, 
ac per ea manifesta eidem facere, quae jam moveri ccepta sunt, quanquam 
et ilia eandem cognoscere sumus persuasi. Cum itaque comperissemus 
quosdam alienos a sancta, catholica, et apostolica ecclesia, impiorum 
Nestorii et Eutychetis sequutos deceptionem, divinum antehac promul- 
gavimus edictum (quod et tua novit sanctitas) per quod hsereticorum furores 
reprehendimus, ita ut nullo quovis omnino modo immutaverimus, immute- 
mus aut praetergressi simus eum, qui nunc usque, coadjuvante Deo, ser- 
vatus est, ecclesiasticum statum (quemadmodum et tua novit sanctitas) sed 
in omnibus servato statu unitatis sanctissimarum ecclesiarum cum ipso S. S. 
Papa veteris Romae, ad quem similia hisce perscripsimus. Nee enim 
patimur ut quicquam eorum, quae ad ecclesiasticum spectant statum, non 
etiam ad ejusdem referatur beatitudinem : quum ea sit caput omnium 
sanctissimorum Dei sacerdotum ; vel eo maxime quod, quoties in eis locis 
haeretici pullularunt, et sententia et recto judicio illius venerabilis sedis 
coerciti sunt." 

" The above documents are to be found at full length in the 
volume of the civil law (Codicis lib. I. tit. i.), and by being 



612 APPENDIX. 



of Papal power, 1260 years from its commencement and 
close, in lunar, calendar, and solar forms, extend to the 
overthrow of Papal power in the French Revolution, and 
the bursting of its after waves, the Revolutions of 1830, 
1848-9, and 1868-70; including the double overthrow of 
the temporal power in the Pontificate of Pius IX. 
From the accession of Gregory the Great, and from the sub- 
sequent decree of Phocas, 1260 solar and 1260 calendar years 
meet in the crisis of 1848-9, — the revolution era of the rise of 
the Second French Republic; thence to 1870, is the period of the 

published in that collection, they obtained the stamp of public 
and legislative authority as the laws of the empire. In these 
documents we find the Emperor publishing a rule of faith to 
his subjects of the Eastern Empire, and addressing the Pope 
of Rome on the occasion, as the acknowledged head of all the 
churches (not the Western churches only), and requesting the 
approbation of what he had done. We see the Pope, in reply, 
giving the sanction of his authority as the acknowledged head of 
the Church, to the religious edict of Justinian." — Cuningha??ie 
on the Seals and Trumpets of the Apocalypse and the prophetical 
period of 1260 years, p. 222-227. 

The Decree of Phocas is thus referred to by Diaconus — 
*' Hie (Phocas) rogante Papa Bonefacio, statuit sedem Romanse ecclesias, 
ut caput esset omnium ecclesiarum ; quia ecclesia Constantinopolitana 
primam se omnium ecclesiarum scribebat" (Paulus Diaconus, " De Gestis 
Romanorum ad Eutropii Historiam Additus," lib. xvii.). 

(Diaconus refers to it in the same terms in his work " De Gestis Longo- 
bardorum.") 

The following is from Anastasius, "Historia Ecclesiastica et de Vitis 
Pontificum," P. ii. p. 44, c. 3 : — 

" Bonefacius III., Anno Christi, 606 ; Phocse Imp., 4. 

" Bonefacius, natione Romanus, ex patre Joanne Cabaudioce, sedet men- 
ses octo, dies viginti octo. Hie obtinuit apud Phocam Principem, ut sedes 
apostolica beati Petri apostoli caput esset omnium ecclesiarum, id est, 
ecclesia Romana, quia ecclesia Constantinopolitana primam se omnium 
ecclesiarum scribebat. " 



APPENDIX. 613 



third Napoleon, linked in his rise and fall with the restoration 
and destruction of the Papal temporal power. 

5. From the Hegira era, 1260 Mohammedan or lunar years 
extend to 1844-5, a year signalised by the Mohammedan 
decree granting religious toleration. 



The accession of Pope Boniface III. is stated in the Calendar as Feb. 
18, 607, from Clinton's "Fasti Romani"; also the statement that he 
presided 8 m. 24 d., and died 10th Nov., 607. The see remained vacant 
after the death of Boniface III. from Nov. II, 607, to 24th Aug., 60S, or 
9111. 14 d. 



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REMARKS ON THE CALENDAR. 



I. The character, magnitude, and multiplicity of the events 
constituting the rise, course, decline, and fall of the four great 
Pagan empires of antiquity, render tJwfact that their joint dura- 
tion was, as shown in the calendar, limited to the exact bisection 
of "seven times," or the period of "time, times, and a half 
time," one of the profoundest interest and importance. 

The chronological fact thus discovered is marvellous in itself 
and in that which it implies. 

The hand of God in history, and the inspiration of pro- 
phecy, are clearly attested by this marvellous relation between 
celestial revolutions and chronological periods, which presents 
also irresistible confirmation of the year-day interpretation of 
the 1260 "days" of prophecy, — the assigned duration of the 
second and more important portion of the "Times of the 
Gentiles." 

II. Measuring thus the duration of the four empires by lunar 
years, we reach some important facts respecting the separate 
duration of each of these empires, and the joint duration of the 
second and third. 

1. The Babylonian. The overthrow of Babylon by Cyrus, 
B.C. 538, took place in the 210th solar year from the era 
of Nabonassar ; the duration of that empire was therefore 
seven prophetic months of solar years — one- twelfth of 
"seven times." 

2. The Persian. Reckoning the four empires as successive, 
the Persian dates from the capture of Babylon by Cyrus, 
B.C. 538, and terminates with the conquest of Persia by 



670 APPENDIX. 



Alexander, B.C. 334, a duration of 204 solar or 210 lunar 
years, seven prophetic months of years in lunar form. 

3. The Grecian. From the Grecian conquest of the Per- 
sian empire, B.C. 334, to the Roman conquest of Syria and 
overthrow of Antiochus IX., the last of the Seleucidce, B.C. 
65, followed and completed by the capture of Jerusalem, 
B.C. 63, the year Augustus Csssar was born, there elapsed 
271 solar or 280 lunar years ; that is, forty weeks of lunar 
years. 

(210 years is the twelfth, and 2*80 years the ninth, of 
2520 years, or "seven times.") Connecting the last two 
measures we observe that the thirty weeks of lunar years of 
the Persian, together with the foj'ty weeks of lunar years of 
the Grecian, make together seventy weeks of lunar 

YEARS. 

Thus from the capture of Babylon by Cyrus to the capture 
of Jerusalem by Pompey, the interval was " seventy weeks"; 
in other words, from the Cyrus or Persian era of Jewish 
restoration, to the Augustus or Roman era of " Messiah the 
Prince," was " seventy weeks " of lunar years ; and it should 
be remembered that the entire duration of the four empires is 
measured by lunar years. 

Here again we recognise the hand of God in history. It 
was revealed to Daniel that iC seventy weeks " or 490 years 
should extend from a Persian edict of Jewish restoration to 
Messiah the Prince, and such a period did extend from the 
edict of Artaxerxes to the accomplishment of our Lord's 
atoning work, followed, as foretold, by the Roman destruction 
of the city and temple of Jerusalem ; and here, in harmony 
with this foretold and accomplished fact, we find that the 
interval which reached from the beginning of the Persian e?npire, 
an empire marked in its very outset by Jewish restoration, to 
the beginning of the Roman empire, as reckoned from the sub- 
version of the Grecian Seleucidae, and the Roman conquest of 



APPENDIX. 671 



Syria and capture of Jerusalem, — that this interval, embracing 
the entire duration of the second and third of the four great 
empires, viewed as such, was also 490 years, or "seventy 
weeks " of lunar years. 

4. The Roman. As the Persian and Grecian kingdoms 
occupied 490 of the 1260 years duration of the four em- 
pires, the joint duration of the first and last, the Babylon- 
ian and Roman was limited to 770 lunar years. Had the 
Babylonian just equalled the Persian, 210 lunar years, the 
Roman would have exactly doubled the Grecian, 280 lunar 
years (for 280 x 2 = 560 + 210 = 770), As the Babylonian 
was 210 solar or 217 lunar, 553 lunar remain for the 
Roman empire, or 79 instead of 80 weeks of lunar years. 

Thus then, viewed as successive the Babylonian and Persian 
empires endured respectively for seven months of solar, and 
seven months of lunar years ; the Grecian for forty weeks of 
lunar years, and the Roman for double that period, less one 
such week. 

III. As to the period now reached in the Calendar, the 
year a.d. 1879. We know that the latter half of the Times of 
the Gentiles is in Dan. xii. lengthened by two additions of 30 
and 45 years, making the 126c into 1335 years. We assume 
that the former half may have been similarly lengthened, and 
as a matter of history we see that while 1260 lunar years 
comprised exactly the duration of the four great Pagan 
empires, 1335 so ^ ar * e d to the accession of Gregory the Great, 
the commencement of Latin Christianity. This point seems 
to be the bisection of the entire " Times of the Gentiles " as 
measured from its extreme termini, and comprising two periods 
°f 1335 years. From this point 1260 years terminated in the 
revolution era 1848-9 (which was also 2520 lunar years from 
Nebuchadnezzar's overthrow of Judah), but 1335 years do not 
terminate until the yet future year, 1923. That is, not only 



672 APPENDIX, 



the main period but the added 30 years have already elapsed, 
and we are now entering on the final 45. The year Feb. 
1878-9 was the 2625th from the era of Nabonassar (i.e. 
1335 + 1260 + 30). It witnessed the death of the last Pope 
wielding temporal sovereignty, Pius IX. ; the overthrow of 
Turkish power by Russia, and the establishment of a British 
protectorate over Turkey in Asia. We have long passed the 
termination of the 2520 years as reckoned from Nabonassar, 
and we are within 45 years of their termination as reckoned 
from Nebuchadnezzar, their latest commencing point. If the 
added 75 years are included (as seems probable, and from the 
nature of the case almost certain) in this latest form of the 
period, then we have already entered on the brief final fraction 
of the prophetic times ; they may, of course, be supplementary 
to it, when the end of the age would be by so much the more 
distant. Time only can declare. 

"Therefore be ye also ready, for in such an hour 
as ye think not the Son of man cometh." 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES, 

(added to the sixth edition,) 

On the Chronology of Redemption History. 

To the second half of " seven times," and thus to the whole, 
prophecy adds 75 years. (Dan. xii.) It lengthens the 1260 
(which is the second half of 2520) first to 1290, and then to 
T 335 "days," or years. 

We have shown that astronomy does the same; for 2520 
solar years exceed 2520 lunar by 75 solar years ; thereby con- 
firming the year-day system of interpretation, and illustrating 
the glorious truth that the periods of prophecy, and the revo- 
lutions of worlds, are regulated by one plan, and controlled by 
one and the same Eternal Power. 

Prophecy divides these last 75 years into two distinct parts, 
of 30 and 45 years respectively ; Dan. xii. 11, 12. While cor- 
recting for the sixth edition of this book we have discovered 
that astronomy does the same. The revolutions of sun and moon 
in the period of " seven times," distinctly mark out this divi- 
sion. The proof is simple. 

1. 75 solar years is the difference between 2520 lunar years 
and 2520 solar years. 

2. 2520 solar years therefore contain 75 periods, in each of 
which the sun gains on the moon one solar year. This period, 
33 years, 7 months, 7 days, we have named the Messianic 
cycle. Though not a cycle in the sense of the agreement of 
one integer, or whole period with another, it may be regarded 
as a cycle in the sense of a period in which a certain circle of 

x x 



674 APPENDIX. 



movement is accomplished. A cycle is simply " a perpetual 
round, or circulation, of the same parts of time of any sort." 

3. The nearest cycle to 3$y. 7 m. 7 d., marked by the agree- 
ment of whole periods, is the cycle of 33 years, in which the 
sun gains 12 months on the moon, and the solar and lunar 
years are brought into proximate agreement. Thirty-three 
solar years are thirty-four lunar. 

4. Seventy-five such soli-lunar cycles are analogous 
with the seventy-five cycles of ' " seven times"; they harmonize with 
them, as soli-lunar cycles, similar in number, and analogous in 
character and extent. The similarity between the 33-years' 
cycle, in which the sun gains on the moon a lunar year, and 
the S3 years and a fraction, in which the sun gains a solar 
year, is evident, and therefore the analogy between 75 of the 
one, and 75 of the other. 

5. Seventy-five of the 33-YEARS cycle are 2475 solar 

YEARS, AND THIS PERIOD EXCEEDS 25 20 LUNAR YEARS BY 
30 YEARS, WHILE IT FALLS SHORT OF 2520 SOLAR YEARS BY 

45 years, thus dividing the last 75 years in the "seven times" 
into 30 and 45 years. In other words, 

2520 lunar years are 2445 solar; 

75 33-y ears cycles are 2475 solar 3 

"Seven times" in solar years are 2520 solar ; 

comparing together these three periods we see the second is 
30 years greater than the first, and 45 years less than the third ; 
while the last exceeds the first by 75 years. 



\ 30 years \ 
2520 years > 45 years J 



2445 years 
2475 years 



75 years. 



These are facts which no one can deny ; and their agreement 
with the prophetic times is as evident as is the agreement 
between the revolution of the hour hand of a watch, and the 
diurnal revolution of the sun; or the agreement of any two 
chronometers intentionally set to a common standard, 



APPENDIX. 675 



From these and other facts it is clear that prophetic 

PERIODS KEEP ONE AND THE SAME TIME WITH SOLI-LUNAR 

cycles, and that they should be interpreted on the vast and 
magnificent scale of the complex cycles with which they so 
perfectly agree. 

In the application of the fresh discovery just named, we 
note that reckoning from the completion of the captivity of 
Judah by Nebuchadnezzar (the latest date for the commence- 
ment of the golden headship of Nebuchadnezzar, and the 
Times of the Gentiles), B.C. 598, 2520 lunar years expired in 
1848 ; and 2520 solar years will expire 75 years later, in 1923 ; 
while 75 33-years soli-lunar cycles, reckoned from the same 
starting-point, expired in 1878, thirty years after the first 
terminal date, and forty-five years before the second. Space 
forbids us to add anything here on the events of the thirty 
years from 1848 to 1878, and their terminal character in con- 
nection with the Papacy, whose long and wonderful history is 
the leading subject of the prophecies with reference to the 
"last times." 

There is an interesting historic analogy with the prophetic 
and astronomic division of the closing 75 years in "seven 
times," into 30 and 45 years, in the fact, that the 75 cycles 
contained in the whole "seven times," reckoned from the 
above date of the subjugation of Judah by the King of Baby- 
lon, B.C. 598, ai'e also divided into 30 and 45 cycles by that 
grand terminal event in Roman history, connected with the 
Gothic overthrow of the empire, the awful catastrophe of the 
sack of Rome by Alaric, a.d. 410. 

From B.C. 598 to a.d. 410 extend exactly 30 cycles ; 1007- 
8 years. In that interval the sun gained on the moon just 
30 of the 75 solar years which it gains in the whole "seven 
times." Whatever there may be of importance about this 
coincidence is confirmatory of the year B.C. 598 as the com- 
mencement of the final " seven times." 



676 APPENDIX. 



Astronomic importance of the thirty-three years' 
cycle. 

We have just shown that 75 thirty-three years' cycles exceed 
" seven times " lunar by 30 years, and fall short of " seven 
times " solar by 45 years, and thus coincide with the prophetic 
division of the last 75 years in Dan. xii. 

We have also shown elsewhere that 33 years is not only a 
cycle of the solar and lunar year, but of the solar day with the 
solar year, for it contains just 12,053 days, within 10 minutes; 
and we noted, above all, the important fact that this cycle 
measured the number of complete years in our Lord's earthly 
lifetime. The value of this cycle from a chronological stand- 
point will yet, we believe, be more fully acknowledged by the 
world. Herschel has shown that were the intercalation of leap 
year day regulated by this $^ years cycle, the system would be 
"far more simple and materially more exact than the Gregorian" 
which is now in use. Under the 33-years system, one day 
would be interpolated, as in the Julian system, every fourth 
year, and the intercalation of the eighth day postponed from 
the 32nd year to the 33rd. "To produce an accumulated 
error of a day on this system would require a lapse of 5000 
years." (p. 398.) 

But the 33-years cycle is also remarkable as one in which 
an important compensation is effected in the ever-shifting figura- 
tions, or positions of sun, moon, and earth, and thus in the 
ever-shifting operation of the forces by which their motions 
are guided. 

Let it be remembered that while the length of the solar year 
is invariable, the speed of the earth's motion in its orbit, and 
its distance from the sun, vary from day to day, as also the 
moon's position with reference to sun and earth. These 
variations are considerable ; for the earth is three millions 
of miles nearer the sun at one point in its orbit than at the 
opposite. Its speed is altered in proportion, and the posi- 



APPENDIX. 677 



tion of the moon shifts with that of the earth, the compound 
results of mutual attraction changing with altered positions 
continually. 

Now in the period of 33 years an important circle of these 
changes is completed. If " the sun and moon set out from 
conjunction together, at the twelfth conjunction subsequent, 
the sun will not have returned precisely to the same point of its 
annual orbit, but will fall somewhat short of it." As the 12th 
conjunction will take place 354 days after the first, whereas 
the sun takes 365 days in its revolution, the sun will travel 
11 days in its orbit (iod. 2ih.) after conjunction with the 
moon, before completing its circuit. The year following, the 
12th lunar conjunction will take place at a poifit in the sun's 
orbit 11 days earlier, and so on, until in 33 solar revolutions, 
the 1 1 days' difference will have been multiplied into nearly a 
solar year, and a proximate cycle of compensation will be 
effected. 

This feature of the 33-years cycle lends additional interest 
to the fact we have already noticed, that 75 such cycles, reckoned 
from the commencement of 2520 years, terminate 30 years 
after 2520 lunar, and 45 years before 2520 solar years, and 
thus harmonize remarkably with the prophetic division of the 
75 years, terminating the " seven times." 

It may be noted in this connection that the prophetic period 
of 1335 years contains 40 and a fraction such cycles, and that 
it also contains 70 and a fraction lunar cycles (19-years cycles). 
The 1335 years doubled, extending from the era of Nabonassar, 
B.C. 747 to a.d. 1923, contains therefore twice 40 of the one, 
and twice 70 of the other. By this measurement the 1335 
years of the modern Babylon harmonize with the 70 years' 
captivity in ancient Babylon, and also with the 40 years of 
wilderness wandering. 

Reckoning the 33-years cycle from a.d. 29, fifty-seven such 
cycles are completed before the termination of " seven times " 
in 1923; and fifty-seven such cycles agree with 99 lunar 
cycles. Fifty-seven 33-years cycles also agree with fifty-six 



678 APPENDIX. 



Messianic cycles (of 33V. 7m. 7d.). Fifty-six of the longer 
cycle, like fifty-seven of the shorter, equal 1881 years. 

Reckoning from that great starting-point in the Calendar of 
Redemption history, the resurrection of our Lord, which took 
place, as far as we can ascertain, in a.d. 29 {certainly within a 
year or two of that date), the termination of the " seven times? 
in a.d. 1923, will fall in the hundredth lunar cycle. (One 
hundred lunar cycles are just nineteen centuries.) It should 
be remembered in this connection that the sacred calendars, 
both of Jews and Christians, employ the 19-years lunar cycle ; 
and that the latter regulate by this cycle the annual com- 
memoration of Easter, the glorious resurrection period. This 
" cycle of the moon, commonly called the golden number, is a 
revolution of 19 years, in which time, the conjunctions, opposi- 
tions, and other aspects of the moon, are within an hour and a 
half of being the same as they were on the same day of the 
months 19 years before." 

THE 2300 YEARS OF PROPHECY, ONE-THIRD OF 700O YEARS. 

We have already referred to the fact that 2300 years are the 
nearest third in centuries of 7000 solar years. While correcting 
for this edition we have noticed that 2300 solar years are 
{within eight weeks) the exact third of 7000 calefidar years. 

(The calendar year is 360 days, which multiplied by 7000 = 
2,520,000 days, whose third is 840,000 days; and 2300 solar 
years are 840,057 days.) 

Terminus a quo of the 2300 years. 

We showed, p. 427-44, that if the commencement of the 
"seventy weeks," B.C. 457, and the era of the Seleucidse, 
B.C. 312, be taken as starting-points for the 2300 years of pro- 
phecy, reckoned in solar and in lunar years, that period termi- 
nates in the years a.d. 1844 an ^ 1919-20. 

The year in which the vision of the 2300 "days" was given 
to Daniel seemed to De Cheseaux the probable starting-point; 



APPENDIX. 679 

and this year he endeavoured to demonstrate from Ptolemy's 
canon to have been B.C. 552 (see Preface, p. viii.). According 
to Clinton it was the year B.C. 553 (the "third year of Bel- 
sliazzar," Dan. viii., whose accession, according to Ptolemy's 
canon, was in b.c 555 ; see Calendar, p. 587). As the vision 
itself commences with the pushing of the Medo-Persian ra7n 
" westward, northward, and southward " (Dan. viii. 4), which 
was accomplished when Xerxes, the Persian monarch, invaded 
Greece (" stirred up all against the realm of Grecia," Dan. xi.), 
some have considered that the 2300 years should be reckoned 
from some date in the reign of that monarch. 

Now 2300 solar years from the date of the vision, B.C. 553, 
and 2300 lunar years from the accession of Xerxes, B.C. 485, 
terminate in the year a.d. 1748; the beginning of the vial 
period of the time of the end; and from a.d. 1748, one hun- 
dred years extend to the prophetic terminus of 1848; and 
175 years to a. d. 1923. The whole period from B.C. 553 to 
a.d. 1923 is 75 soli-lunar 33-year cycles, or 2475 vears - 

We may add that reckoning from the date of the vision, 
B - c - 553; 49° solar years extend to the important initial date 
of the capture of Jerusalem by the Roman General Pompey, 
B.C. 65 ; which was also the year of the birth of Augustus 
Caesar, in whose reign our Lord was born (b.c. 63+490- 
b.c. 553). 

We showed in the calendar that 490 lunar years extended 
to the same date, from the beginning of the Persian empire (as 
succeeding the Babylonian), b.c. 538, the date of the capture 
of Babylon by Cyrus ; and that the entire duration of the four 
empires was measured by lunar years — 1260 lunar years. 

Interval between the Epoch of the Creation of Man, 
and the End of the " Seven Times," a.d. 1923. 

The date which Clinton, the most reliable of chronologers, 
assigns from Scripture for the creation of man is B.C. 4138. 
Astronomy has ascertained that the coincidence of the solar 



68o APPENDIX. 



perigee with the autumnal equinox — that great natural starting- 
point in terrestrial time — took place B.C. 3958. The possible 
limits of error in these dates are comparatively narrow, espe- 
cially in the second of these dates, which must be very approxi- 
mately correct. 

From B.C. 4138 to a.d. 1923, the interval is 6060 solar 
years; and from ^.c. 3958 to a.d. 1923 there are 5880 solar 
years. Now 5880 solar years are exactly 6060 lunar years; 
so that from these two initial dates, or starting-points in terres- 
trial reckoning, 6060 solar, and 6060 lunar years, extend to 
the completion of the " seven times " of prophecy. 

The interval between B.C. 4138 and B.C. 3958 is 180 solar 
years, which is half 360, and equivalent to the epact of the 
entire 6060 solar years. 

If the creation of man took place B.C. 4138, the second of 
these dates coincided with the 50th year in the life of Seth. 
(Adam 130 y. to birth of Seth + 50 = 180 y.) 

If the sixfold unsabbatic period in the great time week should 
be 6060 years, it will perfectly agree with the measures of the 
Jubilee type. The Jubilee (49 years) is 606 months ; and the 
great Jubilee, the " 70 weeks " (490 years) is 6060 months ; 
and twelve such are 6060 lunar years (or 5880 solar; for 490 x 
12 = 5880). According to these measures, the millenary day of 
the time week is 10 10 years. In 1007V. 7m. the sun gains 
just 30 solar years on the moon ; 1008 years in whole num- 
bers ; or in multiples of 10, 1010 years. The whole time 
week would on this scale be 7070 years, and would han?ionize 
with ten cycles of the ?nagnificent planet Saturn a?id the earth, 
707 years, in each of which Saturn makes 24 revolutions; 
(12 + 12.) 

The revolution of the solar perigee and of the equinoxes 
create a great cycle of the seasons (p. 561). The day of 
this gigantic year is 57 J solar years; its week is 400 solar 
years ; and as 4400 years extend from the beginning of human 
history afier the .Flood to the terminus of the " seven times," 



APPENDIX, 68 1 

that interval is seventy-seven days of the vast season year, and 
harmonizes with the numerous "seventy-seven" terminal periods. 

Though the astronomic measures of the prophetic times are 
perfectly reliable, and afford most important help in ascer- 
taining their character and place, yet it should ever be remem- 
bered that the historic uncertamty as to the exact applicatio?i of 
these periods should prevent any attempt to foretell the year, 
or the " day and hour" of the end. 

It is in this as with huma?i life, — we can often tell from the 
agS of the individual, combined with various symptoms, that 
the end of life is very near, when unable to foresee the exact 
day and hour of its termination. 

To realize in such cases the solemn fact that the end is nigh 
is wise and right ; whereas to attempt to prophecy the hour or 
moment of the close would be a vain assumption, and also an 
unwarrantable intrusion into that which the hand of God has 
veiled with obscurity. But the limits of uncertainty as to the 
time of the end must in such cases be narrow, and must grow still 
more narrow as the end draws nigh. 

It is our deep conviction, derived from a prolonged examina- 
tion of the whole subject, that the period called in the Book of 
Daniel " the e?id of the days " is nearly reached ; that a few 
more years at most shall elapse, before the glorious Epiphany 
when The Lord shall come, and all His saints with 
Him. 

Let us ever remember that He may come sooner than we 
expect; for He will surely come "as a thief" that is, when 
not expected ; " therefore let us not sleep as do others, but let 
us watch and be sober." 

It was with reference to the events of the last days of this 
dispensation, the very events which we see taking place in this 
19th century, that Jesus said, — "When these things begin 

TO COME TO PASS, THEN LOOK UP, AND LIFT UP YOUR HEADS, 
FOR YOUR REDEMPTION DRAWETH NIGH." 

Let us joyfully obey the Master's command! — "Looking 



682 APPENDIX. 



for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of 
the Great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ, who 
gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from 
all iniquity, and purify unto hlmself a peculiar 
people, zealous of good works." 

"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day 
nor the hour when the son of man cometh." 



APPENDIX B. 



AUTHORS CONSULTED IN THE PREPARATION 
OF THIS WORK. 

WORKS ON ROMANISM. 

About, E. — The Roman Question. Translated from the French. Lon- 
don : W. Jeffs. 

Alexander, Wm. Lindsay. — Anglo -Catholicism not Apostolical : an 
Enquiry into the Scriptural Authority of the leading Doctrines advo- 
cated in the "Tracts for the Times." Longmans. 

Apostasy. — The Great Apostasy ; or, the Church of Rome proved to be 
not the Church of Christ. London : Hamilton, Adams & Co. 

Arthur, Wm., M.A. — The Pope, the Kings, and the People. 2 vols. 
London : Nisbet. 

Barlee, Ellen. — The Bible in Rome, with a record of Protestant Mis- 
sions established since 1873. London : Hatchards. 

Barrow, Isaac, D.D. — A Treatise of the Pope's Supremacy. 

Baxter, Richard. — A Key for Catholics, to open the Juggling of the 
Jesuits, and to satisfy all who are truly willing to understand whether 
the cause of the Roman or Reformed Churches be of God. London ? 
Hamilton, Adams & Co. 

Bertram.— The Book of Bertram the Priest, concerning the Body and 
Blood of Christ in the Sacrament. Written by the command of the 
Emperor Charles the Bald, in the 9th century. Translated into English 
in 1549. 

Buckley, Theodore Alois. — The Catechism of the Council of Trent. 
Translated into English. London : Routledge. 

Burnet, Gilbert, D.D. — Letter from the Assembly General of the Clergy 
of France to the Protestants, inviting them to return to their Com- 
munion. Translated and examined by Gilbert Burnet, D.D. 16S3. 

Catholic Registry. — Battersby's Registry for the Catholic World, with 
the complete Ordo. The Registry contains lists of the bishops, 
priests, and parishes of the three kingdoms, and Continental, Asiatic, 
African, American, Oceanican, and Colonial Registries. London : 
Richardson. 



684 APPENDIX. 



Cayetano, El Padre. Explicacion de la doctrina Christiana segun ei 
metodo con que la ensenan los padres de las escuelas pias. Valla- 
dolid. 1802. 

Chillingworth.— Religion of Protestants, a safe Way to Salvation, with 
his ten Tracts against Popery. London : Thomas Tegg. 

Clark, The Rev. Jno. A.— Rome, its Wonders and its Worship. Lon- 
don : Samuel Bagster & Sons. 

Clement XIV. — Letters of Pope Clement XIV. (Ganganelli), to which 
are prefixed Anecdotes of his Life. Translated from the French, 
1777. 

Court of Rome. — The History of Monastical Conventions and Military 
Institutions, with a Survey of the Court of Rome ; or, a Description of 
the Court of Rome, in all the great Offices, and Officers ecclesiastical 
and civil dependant thereon ; also the Ceremonies of the Consis- 
tories, Conclave, and those that have been used in the creation of Car- 
dinals, the election of the High Bishop or Pope, etc. 1686. 

Coverdale, Miles. — The Letters of the Martyrs : collected and published 
in 1564 : with Introductory Remarks by the Rev. Edward Bickersteth. 
London : Shaw. 

Cuninghame, Wm. — The Apostasy of the Church of Rome and the 
Identity of the Papal Power with the Man of Sin and Son of Per- 
dition. London : Hatchard. 

Duff, Alexander, D.D.— The Jesuits : their Origin and Order, Morality 
and Practices, Suppression and Restoration. Edinburgh : Johnstone 
& Hunter. 

Dupin, L. E. — The History of the Church. In 4 vols. Translated from 
the French. 

Elliott, Rev. Charles, D.D. — Delineation of Roman Catholicism, 
drawn from the authentic and acknowledged Standards of the Church 
of Rome ; namely, her Creeds, Decisions of Councils, Papal Bulls, 
Roman Catholic Writers, the Records of History, etc. London: 
Mason. 

Faulis, Henry, B.D., Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. — The 
History of Romish Treasons and Usurpations, together with a par- 
ticular Account of many gross Corruptions and Impostures in the 
Church of Rome. 1 67 1. 

Fleming, Robert. — The Rise and Fall of Rome Papal. Reprinted from 
the first edition in 1701. London : Houlston & Stoneman. 

Foye, Rev. M. W., M.A. Oxon. — Romish Rites, Offices, and Legends; 
or, Authorized Superstitions and Idolatries of the Church of Rome ; 
containing the greater portion of the Roman Pontifical, the Ordinary 
of the Mass ; the principal Festivals and Offices of the Blessed Virgin 
Mary, copious Selections from the Services, Hymns and Legends 0/ 



APPENDIX. 68$ 



the Roman Breviary, and the Canonization of the Saints, etc., with 
the Latin text and translations. Published by the British Society for 
Promoting the Religious Principles of the Reformation. 

Free Thoughts. — Free Thoughts on the -Toleration of Popery, deduced 
from a Review of its Principles and History, with respect to Liberty 
and the Interests of Princes and Nations. Edinburgh : Donaldson. 

Gavazzi, Alessandro.— My Recollections of the last four Popes, and of 
Rome in their times. An answer to Dr. Wiseman. London : Par- 
tridge & Co. 

Gibbings, Richard, A.B. — An exact Reprint of the Roman Expurga- 
torius : the only Vatican Index of this kind ever published. London • 
Rivington. 

Hall, Joseph, D.D., Bishop of Exeter and Norwich.— The Peace 
of Rome : whereto is prefixed a serious Dissuasive from Popery. 
Oxford : D. A. Talboys. 

Hall, Newman, B.A. — The Land of the Forum and the Vatican. Lon- 
don : Nisbet. 

Henry VIII. , King of England, France, and Ireland. — Assertio 
Septem Sacramentorum : or, a Defence of the Seven Sacraments, 
against Martin Luther. To which are adjoined, His Epistle to the 
Pope. The Oration of Mr. John Clark (Orator to His Majesty) on 
the delivery of this book to his Holiness, and the Pope's Answer to the 
Oration, as also, the Pope's Bull, by which his Holiness was pleased 
to bestow upon that King (for composing that book) that most illus- 
trious, splendid, and most Christian-like title of Defender of the Faith. 
Faithfully translated into English from the original Latin Edition. 
By T. W. Gent. 1766. 

Homilies. — Homily appointed to be read in Churches in the time of 
Queen Elizabeth against the peril of Idolatry. 

Hughes. — The "Man of Sin;" or, a Discourse of Popery, wherein the 
numerous and ^monstrous Abominations, in Doctrines and Practices, of 
the Romish Church are by their own hands exposed so to open light 
that the very blind may see them, and Antichrist in capital letters 
engraven on them. By no Roman but a Reformed Catholic. 1677. 

Inquisition. — Artes de la Inquisizion Espanola ; primer traduczion Cas- 
tellana de la obra Escrita en Latin. Por el Espanol Raimundo Gon- 
zalez de Montes. Printed by A. B. B. Wiffen. Woburn. 

Inquisition. — Authentic Memoir\> concerning the Portuguese Inquisition, 
never before published. London: Murray. 1769. 

Janus. — The Pope and the Council. Translated from the German. Riv- 
ingtons. 

Luther, Martin. — The Pope Confounded and his Kingdom Exposed. 
Translated by the Rev. Heniy Cole. London : J. Nisbet & Co. 



686 APPENDIX. 

McGhee, Rev. Robert J., A.B. — The Complete Notes of the Doway 
Bible and Rhemish Testament. Extracted from the quarto editions of 
1816 and 1818, published under the patronage of the Roman Catholic 
Bishops and Priests of Ireland, as the Authorized Interpretation of 
the Church, and the Infallible Guide to Everlasting Life. London : 
Hat chard. 

Mac Walter, J. G.— The Irish Reformation Movement, a History of the 
Irish Church. London : Seeleys. 

Maistre, Count Joseph de. — Letters to a Russian Gentleman, on the 
Spanish Inquisition. Translated by the Rev. iEneas M'D. Dawson. 
London : C. Dolman. 

Manual, The Ursuline.— Richard Coyne, Dublin. 

Manual de Piete. — A l'usage des eleves du Sacre Cceur. Lecoffre fils 
et Cie., Paris. 

Meagher, A. — (Originally a priest in the Church of Rome.) — Paganism 
and Romanism Compared. London : Seeleys. 

Mede. — Apostasy of the Latter Times, with an Introduction by Rev. T. R. 
Birks. London: W. H. Dalton. 

Mendham, Rev. Joseph, M.A., M.E.H.S. — An Index of Books Pro- 
hibited by command of Pope Gregory XVI. London : Duncan. 

Michelson, Dr. Edwd. H. — Modem Jesuitism ; or, the Movements and 
Vicissitudes of the Jesuits in the Nineteenth Century, in Russia, Eng- 
land, Belgium, France, and Switzerland, etc. London : Darton. 

Middleton, Dr. — Popery Unmasked, being the substance of Dr. Middle- 
ton's celebrated Letter from Rome : demonstrating an exact Con- 
formity between Popery and Paganism. 1744. 

More, H., D.D. — Inquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity. 1664. 

O'Sullivan, Rev. Mortimer. — The Apostasy Predicted by St. Paul. 
London : Longman, Brown & Co. 

O'Sullivan, Rev. .Mortimer. — Romanism as it Rules in Ireland. By 
Rev. M. O'Sullivan and Rev. Robert J. McGhee, A.B. 2 vols. 
London : Hatchard & Co. 

Papal Power ; or, an Historical Essay on the Temporal Power of the 
Popes, the Abuse of their Spiritual Authority, and the Wars they have 
Declared against Sovereigns ; containing very Extraordinary Docu- 
ments of the Roman Court, never before published. Translated from 
the French. 2 vols. London : Hatchard. 

Papist, A, Misrepresented and Represented ; or, a Twofold Character of 
Popery. Containing a sum of the Superstitions, Idolatries, Cruelties, 
Treacheries, etc., of Popery. Published 1685. 

Percy, Hon. J. W. — Romanism as it exists at Rome, exhibited in various 
Inscriptions and other Documents in the Churches and other Ecclesi- 
astical places in that city. Seeley, Burnside & Seeley. 1847. 



APPENDIX. 687 



Philpot, Js. M.A. — The Advance of Popery in this country, viewed under 
both its Religious and Political Aspect. London : J. Gadsby. 

Pius V,— The Life and Pontificate of St. Pius V., by Rev, Joseph Mend- 
ham, M.A. London : Duncan. 

Poole, Matthew. — Dialogue between a Popish Priest and an English 
Pretestant. London : Baisler. 

Poulter, J. J. — A Course of Lectures on the Rise, Progress, Present 
Aspect, Papal Development, and Tendencies of Puseyism. London : 
Ward & Co. 

Poynder, Jno. — Popery in alliance with Heathenism. London : Hatchard. 

Protestant, The. — A Series of Essays on the Principal Points of Con- 
troversy between the Church of Rome and the Reformed. Four vols. 
Glasgow : Blackie. 

Ranke, Leopold. — History of the Popes, their Church and State, and 
especially of their Conflicts with Protestantism in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. Translated by E. Foster. London : Bohn. 

Rogers, John. — Anti-Popery ; or Popery Unreasonable, Unscriptural, 
and Novel, with a Chronological Map, showing the post-apostolic 
and modern origin of Popery. London : Simpkin & Marshall. 

Rome, Church of. — A Report on "the Books and Documents on the 
^Papacy," deposited in the University Library, Cambridge, the Bodleian 
Library, Oxford, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, entitled 
The Church of Rome ; her present Moral Theology, Scriptural In- 
struction, and Canon law. London : Partridge. 

Rule, W. H., D.D. — History of the Inquisition, in every country where 
its Tribunals have been Established, from the twelfth century to the 
present time. 1868. London : Wesleyan Conference Office. 

Rycaut, Paul.— Lives of the Popes, to the reign of Sextus IV. 1685. 

Seymour, Rev. M. H., M.A. — Mornings among the Jesuits at Rome. 
London : Seeleys. 

Shoberl, F. — Persecutions of Popery : historical Narratives of the most 
remarkable Persecutions occasioned by the Intolerance of the Church 
of Rome. London : Bentley. 2 vols. 

Stanford, C. S. — A Handbook to the Romish Controversy : being a Re- 
futation in detail of the Creed of Pope Pius IV. London : Seeleys. 

Steele, Sir Richard. — An Account of the State of the Roman Catholic 
Religion throughout the World. Written for the use of Pope Inno- 
cent XL, by Monsignor Cerri, Secretary of the Congregation de Pro- 
paganda Fide. 1715. Translated into English from the Italian. 

Stillingfleet, Edward, D.D. — A Discourse concerning the Idolatry 
practised in the Church of Rome- London. 167 1. 

Trent, Council of. — The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 
by Theodore Alois Buckley, B.A. London : Routledge. 



688 APPENDIX. 

Urwick, William. — The Triple Crown ; or, the Power, Course, and 
Doom of the Papacy. London : Simpkin & Marshall. 

Whitby, Daniel, D.D. — A Discourse concerning the Idolatry of the 
Church of Rome. London. 1674. 

Willet, Andrew, D.D. — Synopsis Papismi j or, a general View of the 
Papacy. Published by the British Society for Promoting the Religious 
Principles of the Reformation. Ten vols. 

Wordsworth, Chr. (Canon of Westminster). — Letters to M. Gondin, on 
the destructive Character of the Church of Rome, both in Religion and 
Polity. London : Rivington. 1848. 

Wylie, Rev. J. A., LL.D. — The Road to Rome via Oxford ; or, Ritual- 
ism identical with Romanism. London : Partridge and Co. 

Wylie, Rev. J. A., LL.D. — The Papacy; its History, Dogmas, Genius, 
and Prospects : being the Evangelical Alliance prize Es^say on Popery. 
London : Hamilton, Adams & Co. 

WORKS ON PROPHECY. 

Abdiel. — Essays on the Advent and Kingdom of Christ and the Events 

connected therewith. By the Rev. J. W. Brooks, M.A. London : 

Simpkin & Marshall. 
Addis, Alfred, B.A. — The Theory of Prophecy : as it respects more 

particularly Civil Establishments of Christianity, the Nicene Heresy of 

Antichrist, and the Doctrine of the Millennium. London : Hurst. 
Barnes, Rev. A. — Notes explanatory and practical, on the Book of 

Daniel. London : Routledge. 
Baxter, Robert. — Prophecy the Key of Providence. London : Seeley, 

J. &H. 
Ben Ezra, Juan Josafat. — The Coming of Messiah in Glory and 

Majesty. London : Simpkin & Marshall. 
Bicheno, J., M.A. — The Fulfilment of Prophecy farther illustrated by the 

Signs of the Times. London: Ogles, Duncan & Co. 1817. 
Bickersteth, Rev. Edward. — A Practical Guide to the Prophecies. 

London: Seeleys. 
Bickersteth, Rev. E. — The Restoration of the Jews to their own Land 

in connection with their future Conversion and the final Blessedness of 

our earth. London : Seeley & Co. 
Bickersteth, Rev. E. — The Divine Warning to the Church, at this time, 

of our Enemies, Dangers, and Duties, and as to our Future Prospects. 

London : Seeley & Co. 
Birks, Rev. T. R. — The Mystery of Providence; or, the Prophetic History 

of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. An Historical Exposi- 
tion of Rev. viii. , ix. London : Nisbet. 



APPENDIX. 689 



BlRKS, Rev. T. R. — First Elements of Sacred Prophecy : including an 
Examination of several recent Expositions, and of the Year-day theory. 
London : Painter. 

BlRKS, Rev. T. R. — Commentary on the Book of Isaiah, critical, histori- 
cal, and prophetical ; including a revised English Translation. Lon- 
don : Rivington. 

BlRKS, Rev. T. R. — The four prophetic Empires and the Kingdom of 
Messiah ; being an Exposition of the first two Visions of Daniel. 
London : Seeley. 

Birks, Rev. T. R. — The two later Visions of Daniel : historically ex- 
plained. London : Seeley. 

Bonar, Rev. A. A. — Redemption Drawing Nigh. A Defence of the 
Premillennial Advent. London : Nisbet. 

Bonar, Rev. Horatius. — Prophetical Landmarks. Containing data for 
helping to determine the question of Christ's Pre -millennial Advent. 
London : Nisbet. 

Bonar, Rev. Horatius. — The Coming and Kingdom of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, being an examination of the work of the Rev. D. Brown, on 
the Second Coming of the Lord. London : Nisbet. 

Bosanquet, J. W. — Messiah the Prince ; or, the Inspiration of the 
Prophecies of Daniel. Containing remarks on the views of Dr. 
Pusey, Mr. Desprez, and Dr. Williams, concerning the Book of Daniel ; 
a rectified system of Scripture dates, throwing light on the Prophecy 
of the seventy weeks ; a treatise on the Sabbatical Years and Jubilees , 
and a compendium of sacred and secular chronology. London : 
Longmans, Green & Co. 

Brightman, Thomas. — A Revelation of the Revelation ; that is, the 
Revelation of St. John opened clearly with a logicall Resolution and 
Exposition. Wherein the sense is cleared, out of the Scripture ; the 
event also of thinges foretold is discussed out of the Church Historyes. 
1615. 

Brooks, Rev. J. W. — Elements of Prophetical Interpretation. London : 
Seeley. 

Brown, Rev. David. — Christ's Second Coming, will it be Pre-millennial ? 
London : Hamilton & Adams. 

Burder, Henry F., D.D. — Notes on the Prophecies of the Apocalypse. 
London : Ward & Co. 

Chauncey, W. S. — Dissertations on Unaccomplished Prophecy. Lon- 
don : Nisbet. 

Clarke, J. Algernon. — A Compendium of Scripture Prediction, with 
special reference to the Duration and Doom of the Papal Antichrist, 
the Judgments of the Great Day of God Almighty, and the Dawn of 
Millennial Glory. London : Nisbet. 

Y Y 



690 APPENDIX. 



Clarke, J. E — Dissertation on the Dragon, Beast, and False Prophet of 

the Apocalypse. 1814. 
Clogher, Lord Bishop of. — A Dissertation on Prophecy, wherein the 

Coherence and Connexion of the Prophecies in both the Old and New 

Testament are fully considered. 1749. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. — The Fall of Babylon Foreshadowed in hei 

Teaching, in History, and in Prophecy. London : Bentley. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. — The Last Warning Cry. London : Nisbet. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. — Lectures for the Times ; or, Illustrations and 

Refutations of the Errors of Romanism and Tractarianism. London : 

Hall & Co. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. — Apocalyptic Sketches ; or, Lectures on the 

Seven Churches of Asia Minor. London : Arthur Hall. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. —The Millennial Rest ; or, the World as it will 

be. London : Bentley. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. —Apocalyptic Sketches ; or, Lectures on the 

Book of Revelation. First and second series. London : Hall. 
Cumming, Rev. J., D.D. — Lectures on the Book of Daniel. London : 

Hall. 
Cuninghame, Wm. — On the Jubilean Chronology, with a brief account 

of the discoveries of M. L. de Cheseaux as to the Great Astronomical 

Cycles. 1834. 
Cuninghame, Wm. — The Season of the End. London: 1841. 
Cuninghame, Wm. — The Fulness of the Times. London : 1837. 
Cuninghame, Wm. —The Certain Truth, the Science, and the Authority 

of the Scriptural Chronology. London : Seeleys. 
Cuninghame, Wm. — A Dissertation on the Seals and Trumpets of the 

Apocalypse, and the Prophetical Period of 1260 years. Hatchard. 1813. 
Daubuz, Charles, M.A. — A Perpetual Commentary on the Revelation 

of St. John. 1720. 
Daubuz, Charles, M.A. — A Symbolical Dictionary, in which, agreeably 

to the Nature and Principles of the Symbolical Character and Language 

of the Eastern Nations in the first ages of the World, the general Signi- 
fication of the Prophetic Symbols, especially those of the Apocalypse, 

is laid down and proved from the most Ancient Authorities, sacred 

and profane. London : Nisbet. 
Denny, Sir E. — Companion to a Prophetical Chart, entitled " The 

Feasts of the Lord." London : Broom. 
Duffield, Geo. — Millenarianism Defended ; a reply to Prof. Stuart. 

New York : Newman. 
Duffield, Geo — Dissertations on the Prophecies relative to the Second 

Coming of Jesus Christ. New York : Newman. 
Elliott, Rev. E. B., A.M. — Horse Apocalypticse ; or, a Commentary on 



APPENDIX. 691 



the Apocalypse, Critical and Historical ; including also an Examination 
of the chief Prophecies of Daniel. Illustrated by an Apocalyptic 
Chart, and engravings from Medals and other extant Monuments ol 
antiquity. 4 vols. London : Seeley. 

Elliott, Rev. E. B., M.A.— The Destinies and Perils of the Church, as 
Predicted in Scripture. London : Seeley. 

Faber, G. S., B.D. — The Sacred Calendar of Prophecy ; or, a Disserta- 
tion on the Prophecies which treat of the grand period of " Seven 
Times," and especially of its second moiety, or the latter Three Times 
and a Half. 3 vols. London : Painter. 

Faber, G. S., B.D. — A Dissertation on the Prophecies that have been 
fulfilled, are now fulfilling, or will hereafter be fulfilled, relative to the 
great period of 1260 years j the Papal and Mohammedan Apostasies. 
1808. 

Faber, G. S., B.D. — A General and connected View of the Prophecies 
relative to the Conversion, Restoration, Union, and Future Glory of 
the Houses of Judah and Israel. London: Rivington. 2 vols. 

Frere, J. H. — A Combined View of the Prophecies. Hatchard. 

Gosse, Philip Henry, F.R.S. — The Prophetic Times. 

Habershon, Matthew. — An Historical Exposition of the Prophecies of 
the Revelation of St. John ; showing their connection with and con- 
firmation of those of Daniel, and of the Old Testament in general ; 
particularly in the most important aspect on the present times. 2 
vols. London : Nisbet. 

Habershon, Matthew. — An Historical Dissertation on the Prophetic 
Scriptures of the Old Testament, chiefly those of a Chronological 
character ; showing their aspect on the Present Times, and on the 
Destinies of the Jewish nation. London : Nisbet. 

Hoare, Rev. E. — Rome, Turkey, and Jerusalem. London : Hatchard. 

Hollingsworth,Rev. A. G. H., M.A.— The Holy Land Restored ; or, 
an Examination of the Prophetic Evidence for the Restitution ol 
Palestine to the Jews. London : Seeley. 

Holmes, Rev. J. D., A.M.— The Fulfilment of the Revelation of St. 
John Displayed. 1819. 

Hurd, Richard, D.D.— An Introduction to the Study of the Prophecies 
concerning the Christian Church ; and in particular concerning the 
Church of Papal Rome. London : Rickerby. 

Investigator. — Investigator and Expositor of Prophecy. By Rev. J. W. 
Brooks. 5 vols. London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 

Irving, Rev. Edward, A.M.— Babylon and Infidelity Foredoomed of 
God. A Discourse on the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse 
which relate to these Latter Times, and until the Second Advent. 
London : Hamilton, Adams & Co. 



692 APPENDIX. 



Israel, God's Dealings with. Being Lectures delivered during Lent, 
1850, at St. George's, Bloomsbury. London : Nisbet. 

Keith, Alex., D.D.— The Signs of the Times, as denoted by the Fulfil- 
ment of Historical Predictions, traced down from the Babylonish 
Captivity to the present time. London : Longman & Co. 

Keith, Alex., D.D.— The Harmony of Prophecy ; or, Scriptural Illus- 
trations of the Apocalypse. Longman & Co. 

Keith, Alex., D.D.— The History and Destiny of the World and of 
the Church, according to Scripture. London : Nelson & Co. 

Keith, Alex., D.D.— The Land of Israel, according to the Covenant 
with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. London, Longman & Co. 

Kimchi, Rabbi David. — Commentary upon the Prophecies of Zechariah. 
Translated from the Hebrew. London : Jas. Duncan. 

Manchester, Duke of. — The Finished Mystery. To which is added an 
examination of Mr. Brown on the Second Advent. London: Hatchard. 

Manchester, Duke of. — The Times of Daniel, Chronological and Pro- 
phetical, examined with relation to the Point of Contact between 
Sacred and Profane Chronology. London : Darling. 

Mede, Joseph, B.D. — The Works of Joseph Mede, in five books. 1648. 

Mede, Joseph, B.D. — Clavis Apocalyptica ex innatis et insitis Visionum 
Characteribus Eruta et Demonstrata. 

Millennial Kingdom, The. —Lectures delivered during Lent, 1852, at 
St. George's, Bloomsbury, by Twelve Clergymen of the Church of 
England. London : Shaw. 

Newton, Sir Isaac. — Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and 
the Apocalypse of S. John. 1733. 

Newton, Thomas, D.D. — Dissertations on the Prophecies. London : 
Blake. 1830. 

Pitcairn, Rev. David. — Zion's King : the Second Psalm expounded in 
the light of History and Prophecy. London : Jackson. 

Seiss, J. A., A.M. — The Last Times. An earnest Discussion of momen- 
tous themes. Baltimore: Kurtz, 1856. 

Sherlock, Dr. Thomas. — The Use and Intent of Prophecy in the 
Several Ages of the World. London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 

Simpson, Rev. David, M.A. — A Key to the Prophecies ; or, a Concise 
View of the Predictions contained in the Old and New Testaments, 
which have been fulfilled, are now fulfilling, or are yet to be fulfilled 
in the latter ages of the world. London : Baynes, 1809. 

Stuart, Moses. — A Commentary on the Apocalypse. London : Tegg. 

Tregelles, S. P., LL.D. — The Hope of Christ's Second Coming: How 
is it taught in Scripture? and Why? London : Houlston & Co. 

Urwtck, William, D.D. — The Second Advent of Christ, the blessed 
Hope of the Church. London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 



APPENDIX. 693 



Vials, The Last. — A series of Essays upon the subject of the Second 

Advent. London : Seeleys. 
(TlTRlNGA, Campegio. — Anaki-isis Apocalypsios Joannis Apostoli qua in 

veras interpretandse ejus hypotheses diligenter inquiritur ; ex iisdem 

Interpretatio facta, certis Historiarum Monumentis confirmatur atque 

illustratur. 1695. 
Warleigh, Rev. Hy. Smith. — Ezekiel's Temple. London : Shaw. 
Wood, Rev. Walter, A.M. — The Last Things. An examination of the 

doctrine of Scripture concerning the Resurrection, the Second Coming 

of Christ, and the Millennium ; with special reference to the second 

edition of the Rev. David Brown's work on the Second Advent. 

London : Nisbet. 
Woodhouse, Jno. Chappkl, D.D. — Annotations on the Apocalypse. 

London : Hatchard. 
Wordsworth, Chr., D.D. — The Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation: 

the original Greek text, with MSS. collations ; an English Translation 

and Harmony, with notes. London : Rivington. 
Wylie, Rev. J. A., LL.D.— The Seventh Vial ; or, the Past and Present 

of Papal Europe, as shown in the Apocalypse. London : Hamilton, 

Adams & Co. 

FUTURIST. 

Bonar, Andrew, Esq., of Leamington. — The Development of Anti- 
christ. London : Partridge & Co. 

Burgh, Rev. William, A.B. — An Exposition of the Book of Revelation. 
London : Bagster. 

Darby, Jno. Nelson. — Notes on the Book of Revelation. London : 
Groombridge. 

HuchedE, P., prEtre. — Histoire de L'Antechrist, ou expose des evene- 
ments certains et probable qui concernent sa personne, son regne, sa 
fin, et son temps, d'apres l'ecriture et la tradition. Par P. Huchede, 
pretre, professeur de Theologie au grand seminaire de Laval. Paris : 
F. Bouquerel. 

Kelly, W. — Six Lectures. London : Broom. 

Kelsall, Hy., M.D., R.N. — A Comparison of Prophetic Scripture with 
reference to the Antichrist, as to his person, actings, and future mani- 
festations. London : Nisbet. 

Maitland, Charles. — The Apostle's School of Prophetic Interpretation: 
with its History down to the present time. London : Longmans. 

Molyneux, Rev. Capel, B.A.— The World to Come. Lectures delivered 
in the Lock Chapel, in Lent, 1853. London : Partridge. 

Molyneux, Rev. Capel, B.A. — Israel's Future. Lectures delivered in 
the Lock Chapel, in Lent, 1S52. 



694 APPENDIX. 



Newton, Benjamin Wills. — Thoughts on the Apocalypse. London : 
Houlston & Son. 

Newton, Benjamin Wills. — Aids to Prophetic Enquiry. First, second, 
and third series. London : Houlston. 

Todd, James Henthorn, B.D., M.R.I. A. — Discourses on the Pro- 
phecies relating to Antichrist in the writings of Daniel and St. John. 
London : Rivington. 

Tregelles, S.P., LL.D. — Remarks on the Prophetic Visions in the Book 
of Daniel. London : Bagster. 

Trotter, W. — Plain Papers on Prophetic and other subjects. London : 
Morrish. 

HISTORICAL WORKS. 

Alison, Sir Archibald, Bart. — History of Europe from the commence- 
ment of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the 
Bourbons in 1 81 5. London: Blackwood. 

Allnutt, H. — Historical Diary of the War between France and Germany, 
1870. London : Estates Gazette Office. 

Beattie, W., M.D. — The Waldenses ; or, Protestant Valleys of Piedmont 
and Dauphiny. London : Geo. Virtue. 

Blanc, Louis. — Histoire de la Revolution de 1848. Paris : Lacroix, 
1871. 

Blaquiere, Edw. — An Historical Review of the Spanish Revolution. 
London : Whittaker. 

Brooks, Rev. J. W. — The History of the Hebrew Nation. London : 
Seeley. 

Browne, H., M.A. — Ordo Sseclorum. A Treatise on the Chronology of 
the Holy Scriptures. London : Parker. 

Bungener, J. F. — History of the Council of Trent. London : Hamilton, 
Adams & Co. 

Burnet, Gilbert, D.D. — The History of the Reformation of the Church 
of England. 4 vols. London : Scott & Co. 

Cheseaux, Loys de. — Abrege Chronologique. 1786-9. 

Clinton, H. F., Esq., M.A. — An Epitome of the Civil and Literary 
Chronology of Rome and Constantinople, from the Death of Augustus 
to the death of Heraclius. Oxford : University Press. 

Clinton, H. F., M.A. — Fasti Plellenici. The Civil and Literary Chrono- 
logy of Greece. Oxford : University Press. 

Cotton, H., D.C.L. — The Five Books of Maccabees. Oxford: University 
Press. 

Creasy, Sir Edward S., M.A. — History of the Ottoman Turks : from 
the beginning of their Empire to the present time. London : Bentley. 



APPENDIX. 695 



Cuninghame, William. — The Chronology of Israel and the Jews from 
the Exodus to the Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Lon- 
don : Nisbet. 

Da Costa, Dr. Isaac— Israel and the Gentiles. Contributions to the 
History of the Jews from the earliest times to the present day. Lon- 
don : Nisbet. 

D'AubignE, J. H. Merle.— History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth 
Century. London : Hamilton, Adams & Co. 

Craig, Rev. J. — History of the Protestant Church.in Hungary, from the 
beginning of the Reformation to 1850. London: Nisbet. 

Eusebius. — The Greek Ecclesiastical Historians of the first Six Centuriey 
of the Christian era. 6 vols. London : Bagster. 

Eustace, J. Chetwode. — A Classical Tour through Italy. 1818. 

Foxe, John. — The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Martyrs. By 
John Foxe. London : Seeley. 

Finn, James. — Sephardim ; or, the History of the Jews in Spain and 
Portugal. London : Rivington. 

Gardner, Rev. James, M.D. and A.M.— The Faiths of the World- 
London : Fullarton. 

Gervinus, B. G. G.— An Introduction to the History of the Nineteenth 
Century. London : Ward, Lock & Co. 

Gibbon, Edw., Esq.— History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
Empire. London : Westley. 

Gibbon, Edw. — History of the Crusades. London: Warne. 

Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., M.P.— Bulgarian Horrors and the Question 
of the East. London : John Murray. 

Hales, Rev. W., D.D. — Analysis of Chronology. London : Rivingtons. 

Hallam, Henry, LL.D. — View of the State of Europe during the 
Middle Ages. London : Alexander Murray. 

Hugonots. — The Protestant Reformation in France; or, History of the 
Kugonots. 2 vols. London : Bentley. 

Jesuits. — Regulse Societatis Jesu. Auctoritate Septimse Congregationis 
Generalis auctas. Romas, in Collegio Romano eiusdem Societatis. 
Anno Domini M. D. C. xvi. Superiorum permissu. 

Joinville, Lord Jno. de. — Chronicles of the Crusaders ; being Contem- 
porary Narratives of the Crusade of Richard Cceur de Lion, by Richard 
of Devizes and Geoffrey de Uinsauf ; and of the Crusade of Saint Louis. 

Josephus, Flavius. — The Works of Flavius Josephus. London : Tegg. 

Kinglake, A. W. — The Invasion of the Crimea : its Origin, and an 
account of its Progress down to the death of Lord Raglan. London : 
Blackwood. 

Krasinski, Count V.— Historical Sketch of the Rise, Progress, and 
Decline of the Reformation of Poland. 2 vols. London : Hatchard. 



696 APPENDIX. 



Lardner, Rev. D., LL.D. etc. — The Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Outlines of 
History. London : Longman. 

Laveleye, Emile de.— De D'Avenir des Peuples Catholiques. Paris: 
Germer, Bailliere. 

Layard, Austen H., M.P. — Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and 
Babylon. London : Jno. Murray. 

Maclear, Rev. G. F., B.D. — Apostles of Mediaeval Europe. London : 
Macmillan. 

Maclear, Rev. G. F., B.D. — A History of Christian Missions during the 
Middle Ages. London : Macmillan. 

Maunder, Samuel. — The Treasury of History. London : Longmans. 

McCrie, Rev. T. — Sketches of Scottish Church History : embracing the 
period from the Reformation to the Revolution. London : Johnstone. 

McCrie, Thos., D.D. — History of the Progress and Suppression of the 
Reformation in Spain in the Sixteenth Century. London : Cadell. 

Mignet, F. A. — History of the French Revolution. London : Davie 
Bogue. 

Milman, H. H., D.D. — History of the Jews. London : Murray. 

Milman, H. H.,D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. — History of Latin Christianity. 
In nine vols. London : Murray, 1872. 

Milnes, Rev. T., M.A. The Turkish Empire : the Sultans, the Terri- 
tory, and the People. London : Religious Tract Society. 

Milnes, Joseph. — "Hie History of the Church of Christ, from the days of 
the Apostles to the close of the eighteenth century. London : Chad- 
wick. 

Monastier, Antoine. — A History of the Vaudois Church from its 
origin, and of the Vaudois of Piedmont to the present day. London : 
Religious Tract Society. 

Mosheim, Jno, Lawrence, D.D. — An Ecclesiastical History, from the 
birth of Christ to the beginning of the eighteenth century. 2 vols. 
London : Tegg. 

Neander, Dr. A. — General History of the Christian Religion and Church. 
London : Bohn. 

Ockley, Simon, B.D. — The History of the Saracens: comprising the 
lives of Mohammed and his successors, to the death of Abdalmelik, 
the eleventh Caliph, with an account of their most remarkable Battles. 
Sieges, Revolts, etc., collected from authentic sources, especially Arabic 
MSS. London : Bohn. 

Osburn, Wm. (Junr.). — Egypt : her Testimony to the Truth. London : 
Bagster. 

Prideaux, Humphrey, D.D. —The Old and New Testament Connected 
in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations, from the declen- 
sion of the Kingdoms of Isra el and Judah to the time of Christ. Lon- 
don : Baynes. 



APPENDIX. 697 



Read, Hollis, A.M. — The Hand of God in History. London : Nelson. 

Records. — Records of the Past : being an English translation of the As- 
syrian and Egyptian Monuments. London : Bagster. 

Reformation. — The Reformation and Anti-Reformation in Bohemia. 
(From the German.) 2 vols. London : Houlston. 

Reid, Daniel. — The Law of History, being a supplement to, and com- 
plement of, " The Divine Footsteps in Human History." London: 
Blackwood. 

Riddle, J. E., M.A. — Ecclesiastical Chronology ; or, Annals of the Chris- 
tian Church from its foundation to the present time. London : Long- 
man. 

Robertson, Wm., D.D. — The History of the Reign of the Emperor 
Charles V., with a view of the Progress of Society in Europe, from 
the subversion of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the sixteenth 
century. London : Rivingtons. 

Rollin, M. — The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, As- 
syrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians, and Macedonians. 
London : Tegg. 

Rosse, Willoughby. — An Index of Dates. London : Bohn. 

Rosse, Willoughby. — Blair's Chronological Tables, revised and en- 
larged. London : Bohn. 

Sale, George. — The Koran. London : Wm. Tegg. 

Scott, Jno., M.A. — Calvin and the Swiss Reformation. London : Seeley. 

Sismondi, J. C. L. de. — Fall of the Roman Empire. 2 vols. London : 
Longman, Rees & Co. 

Sismondi, J. C. L. de. — A History of the Italian Republics, being a 
view of the origin, progress, and fall of Italian Freedom. London : 
Longman, Rees & Co. 

Sismondi, J. C. L. de. — History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, 
in the Thirteenth Century. London : Wightman & Cramp. 

Smedley, Rev. Edward, M.A. — History of the Reformed Religion in 
France. 3 vols. London : Rivingtons. 

Spanheim, Fredk., D.D. — Ecclesiastical Annals. London : Rivington. 

Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, D.D.— Lectures on the History of the 
Eastern Church. London : John Murray. 

Temple, Sir John, Knt. — The Irish Rebellion ; or, an History of the 
attempts of the Irish Papists to extirpate the Protestants in the king- 
dom of Ireland, together with the barbarous Cruelties and bloody 
Massacres which ensued thereupon. Written from his own obser- 
vations, and authentic depositions of other eye-witnesses, by Sir John 
Temple, Knt., Master of the Rolls, and one of his Majesty's mosf 
honourable Privy Council, at that time in Ireland. White, Cochrane 
& Co. London. 1812. 



693 APPENDIX. 



Thiers, M. A. — The History of the French Revolution. London : Whit« 

taker & Co. 
u Times, The." — A Reprint from The Times. The annual summaries fol 

a quarter of a century. Printed at The Times Office. 
" The Times " Register of Events, for 1877, and 1878. Printed at The 

Times Office. 
Trench, Richard C, D.D., Archbp. of Dublin. — Lectures on Medieval 

Church History. London: Macmillan, 1877. 
Trevor, Rev. George, M.A., Canon of York. — Rome : From the Fall 

of the Western Empire. London : Religious Tract Society, 1868. 
Trollope, T. Adolphus. — The Papal Conclaves, as they were and as 

they are. London : Chapman & Hall, 1876. 
Urwick, W. — Ecumenical Councils. London : Simpkin & Co. 
Usher, James, D.D. — The Annals of the Old and New Testament, with 

the Synchronismus of heathen story to the Destruction of Hierusalem 

by the Romanes. 
Valdenses. — Authentic Details of the Valdenses, in Piedmont, and other 

countries; with abridged translations of " L'historie des Vaudois," 

par Bresse, and "La Rentree Glorieuse," d'Henri Arnaud, with the 

ancient Valdensian Catechism. London = Hatchard. 

ASTRONOMICAL WORKS. 

Airey, Sir G. B. — Ipswich Lectures. London. 1849. 

Annales de l'observatoire de Paris. — Publiees par U. J. Le 
Verrier, Directeur de l'Observatoire. Paris : Gauthier-Villars, Quai 
des Grands- Augustins, 55. 

Arago, M. — Popular Lectures on Astronomy. London : Routledge. 

Barlow, Peter. — New Mechanical Tables, containing the Factors, 
Squares, Cubes, Square Roots, Reciprocals, and Hyperbolic Lo- 
garithms of all numbers from I to 10,000. London : Robinson. 

Barlow, Peter. — The Theory of Numbers. London : Johnson. 1811. 

Bonnycastle, John. — An Introduction to Astronomy, by John Bonny- 
castle, of the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. London : John- 
son, 181 1. 

Brinkley, John, D.D. — Elements of Plane Astronomy. Dublin : 
Hodges & Smith. 

Chambers, George F., F.R.A.S. — A Handbook of Descriptive Astro- 
nomy. Third edition. Oxford : Clarendon Press. 

De Cheseaux, Loys.— Memoires Posthumes. Correspondant de l'Aca- 
demie Royale des Sciences de Paris, Associe etranger de celle de Got- 
tingue ; sur divers sujets d'Astronomie et de mathematiques, avec 
de nouvelles tables exactes des moyens mouvements du soleil et de 
la lune. A Lausanne : Antoine Chapuis, Imprimeur. 1754. 



APPENDIX. 699 



Dunkin, Edwin. — The Midnight Sky. By Edward Dunkin, of the 
Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and F.R.A.S., London. London : 
Religious Tract Society. 

Ferguson, James, F.R.S. — Astronomy Explained upon Sir Isaac New- 
ton's Principles, with Notes, etc. By David Brewster, LL.D. London : 
Whittaker. 

Gilbraith, William, M.A. — Mathematical and Astronomical Tables. 
London : Simpkin & Marshall. 

Grant, Robert, F. R. A. S.— History of Physical Astronomy from the 
Earliest Ages to the Middle of the Nineteenth Century. London : 
Bohn. 

Guillemin, A. — The Heavens. Translated by J.N. Lockyer. London : 
1865. 

Herschel, Sir Jno. F. W., Bart.— Popular Lectures on Scientific Sub- 
iects. London : Strahan. 

Herschel, Sir Jno. F. W. , Bart.— Outlines of Astronomy. London : 
Longmans, Green & Co. 

Hind, J. Russell. — The Solar System. London : Orr & Co. 

Hind, J. Russell. — An Introduction to Astronomy. London : Bohn. 

Humboldt, A. von. — Cosmos. Translated by E. C. Otte. London. 
1849-58. 

Hymers, J., B.D.— The Elements of the Theory of Astronomy. 

Laplace, P. S. de. — Traite de Mecanique Celeste. 5 vols. 1798-182"/. 

Laplace, P. S. de. — Mecanique Celeste. Translated, with Commentary, 
by N. Bowditch. 4 vols. Boston, U.S. 1829-39. 

Laplace, P. S. de. — Elementary Illustrations of the Celestial Mechanics 
of Laplace. London : Murray. 

Laplace.— The System of the World. 2 vols. Translated by J. Pond. 
London. 1809. 

Lardner, Dionysius, D.C.L. — Handbook of Astronomy. 2 vols. 
London : Walton & Maberley. 

Lardner, Dionysius, D.C.L. — Natural Philosophy, with a Preliminarj- 
Discourse by J. F. W. Herschel, Esq., M.A. London : Longmans. 

Le Verrier. — Memoires des Variations Seculaires des Elements des 
Orbites. Paris. 1845. 

Lindsay, James Bowman. — The Chrono- Astrolabe ; containing a full set 
of Astronomic Tables, with rules and examples for the Calculation of 
Eclipses and other Celestial Phenomena ; comprising also Plane and 
Spherical Trigonometry, and the most copious list of ancient Eclipses 
ever published ; connected with these, the dates of ancient events are 
exactly determined, and the authenticity of Hebrew, Greek, Roman, 
and Chinese writings is demonstrated. London : Bohn. 

Lloyd, H., D.D., D.C.L.— A Treatise on Magnetism, General and 
Terrestrial. London : Longmans. 



yoo APPENDIX. 



Loomis, E. — Practical Astronomy. New York. 1855. 

Mitchell, O. M., A.M.— The Orbs of Heaven; or, the Planetary and 

Stellar Worlds. London : Routledge. 
Moon, The. — The Moon, considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite. 

By James Nasmyth and J. Carpenter, F.R.A.S. London : Murray. 
Nautical Almanac. — Nautical Almanac and Astronomical Ephemeris. 
Nichol, J. P. — The Architecture of the Heavens. London : Parker. 
Olmsted, D. — Mechanism of the Heavens. Edinburgh. 
Powell, Rev. Baden, M.A., F.R.A.S. — Historical View of the Progress 

of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences, from the earliest ages to 

the present times. London : Longman, Rees & Co. 
Prior, W. H. — Lectures on Astronomy. London : Longman, Rees & Co. 
Proctor, Richard A.— A Star Atlas, drawn by Richard A. Proctor. 

B.A., F.R.A.S. London : Longman, Rees & Co. 
Proctor, Richard A. — Other Worlds than Ours: the Plurality of 

Worlds studied under the light of recent Scientific Researches. 

London : Longmans. 
Proctor, Richard A. — The Sun : Ruler, Fire, Light, and Life of the 

Planetary System. London : Longmans. 
Proctor, Richard A. — The Universe and the Coming Transits, pre- 
senting Researches into and new views respecting the Constitution of 

the Heavens ; together with an investigation of the coming Transits 0/ 

Venus. London : Longmans, Green & Co. 
Register. — The Astronomical Register. London : Potter. 
Rosser, W. H. — The Stars, how to Know them and how to Use them. 

London : Imray. 
Smyth, Captain W. H, R.N. — A Cycle of Celestial Objects. London : 

J. W. Parker, West Strand. 
Smyth, C.P., F.R.S.S. L. & E. (Astronomer Royal for Scotland.)— Our 

Inheritance in the Great Pyramid. London : Strahan. 
Somerville, Mrs. — Mechanism of the Heavens. London : John Murray. 
Whewell, William, M.A. — Astronomy and General Physics, considered 

with reference to Natural Theology. London : Pickering. 



WORKS ON PHYSICS. 

Agassiz, Louis. — Principles of Zoology : touching the Structure, Develop- 
ment, Distribution, and Natural Arrangement of the races of Animals, 
living and extinct. Boston : Gould, Kendall & Lincoln. 

Carpenter, William B., M.D. — Principles of Human Physiology. 
London : Churchill. 

Cheseaux, Loys de. — Discours Philosophique. 1762. 

Harris, Sir W. Snow. — Rudimentary Magnetism • being a concise Exposi- 



APPENDIX. 701 



tion of the general Principles of Magnetical Science and the purposes 

to which it has been applied. London : Lockwood. 
Hay, D. R. — The Natural Principles and Analogy of the Harmony of 

Form. 1842. 
Hay, D. R. — Principles of Beauty in Colouring Systematized. London. 

1845- 
Humboldt, Alexander von. — Aspects of Nature in different Lands and 

different Climates, with Scientific Elucidations. 2 vols. London : 

Longman, Brown & Co. 
Insects.— The Transformations of Insects. By R. Martin Duncan, F.R.S. 

London : Cassell, Petter & Galpin. 
Kirby, William, M.A., F.R. & L.S. — An Introduction to Entomology. 

London : Longman, Rees & Co. 
Lindley, John, Ph. D., F.R.S. — An introduction to Botany. 2 vols. 

London : Longman, Brown & Co. 
"Lancet, The." — The Lancet for years 1842-3 and 1843-4. London: 

Churchill. 
McCosh, Rev. James. — Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation. 

London : Hamilton, Adams & Co. 
' 'MediCaL Review." — The British and Foreign Medical Rerdew. London: 

John Churchill. 
Milner, Rev. Thomas. — A Universal Geography. In four parts : His- 
torical, Mathematical, Physical, and Political. London : Religious 

Tract Society. 
Page, David, LL.D., F.G.S.— Advanced Text-book of Physical Geo- 
graphy. 
Pouchet, F.A., M.D.— The Universe. London : Blackie. 
Quetelet, L. A. J. — Recherches sur la Reproduction et la Mortalite de 

THomme. 1832. 
Quetelet, L. A.J. — Facts, Laws, and Phenomena of Natural Philosophy. 

1835. 
Quetelet, L. A. J. — Physique Sociale. Essai sur le Developpement des 

Facultes de l'Homme. 2 vols. 
Quetelet, L. A. J. — Recherches sur le Penchant au Crime aux differents 

ages. 
Smith, John Pye, D.D., F.R.S., F.G.S.— On the Relation between the 

Holy Scripture, and some parts of Geological Science. London : 

Jackson. 
Somerville, Mrs. M. — On the connection of the Physical Sciences. 
Strabo. — The Geography of Strabo. 3 vols. London : Bohn. 
Wagner, Rudolph, M.D. — Elements of the Comparative Anatomy of 

the Vertebrate AnimaJs. London : Longman, Brown & Co. 



APPENDIX C 



(East Sfmfojcrti Institute, 

FOR HOME AND FOREIGN MISSIONS. 
HARLEY HOUSE, BOW, E., 

AND 

HULME CLIFF COLLEGE, CURBAR, DERBYSHIRE. 

$tm. director : H. GRATTAN GUINNESS. 
Assisted by Tutors and Lecturers. 

treasurer : STEVENSON A. BLACKWOOD, Esq. 

Bankers: London and South Western Bank, Bow Branch. 

This Institute was founded under a deep and pressing sense of the 
claims of the heathen, and of the need of a practical Training Home, where 
Christian young men, of any evangelical denomination, gifted for God's 
service, and sincerely desirous to devote themselves to it, might be received 
and tested, instructed in the truth, and exercised in various branches of 
evangelistic labour, and when sufficiently prepared, helped to go forth as 
missionaries to any country or sphere to which God might providentially 
open their way. 

The need for, and the benefit of, such an Institute may be judged from 
the facts, that during the six years which have elapsed since its commence- 
ment, about one thousand Christian young men have applied to be 
admitted, that about two hundred of these have been received, and that 
of these more than one hundred are already labouring successfully in the 
gospel, either in the Home or the Foreign field. 

The students have been 01 various nationalities ; not only English, 



APPENDIX. 703 



Scotch, and Irish, but French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, 
Russian, Bulgarian, Syrian, Egyptian, Caffre, Negro, Hindoo, Parsee, 
Koordish, Jewish, etc., and they have been of various evangelica. denomin- 
ations ; while those of them who have gone forth as missionaries are now 
connected with equally various societies, as a glance at the accompanying 
list will show. 

The training given is not only intellectual but practical ; several 
Mission Halls, and a Mission Cutter for work among seamen, are attached 
to the Institute, and the Derbyshire branch has a small farm. There are 
about a thousand children taught in the Sunday-schools of the Institute. 

The Biblical instruction is designed to give a clear grasp of the funda- 
mental truths and evidences of Christianity. In addition to the ordinary 
branches of an English education, the students are instructed in the Greek 
of the New Testament, in history and science. Those of them who are 
preparing to become medical missionaries, attend the school of medicine at 
the London Hospital. 

With hardly an exception, the students received into the Institute are not 
in a position to contribute towards the expenses of their own support and 
training, so that this work involves to the Director a very heavy financial 
responsibility. It is carried on in humble dependence on God, whose 
kingdom it seeks to extend on earth, and it has, so far, been sustained, in 
answer to prayer, by his Almighty power through the liberality of his 
people. 

It involves considerable outlay, though the services of Director and 
Secretary are entirely gratuitous, the ordinary expenses being at the rate of 
about ^50 a year for each of the seventy students in training, and a con- 
siderable sum besides being expended directly in missions. Annual reports, 
with regularly audited accounts are published, and may be obtained on 
application to the Hon. Secretary, Mrs. H. Grattan Guinness, Har- 
ley House, Bow, E., together with the periodical of the Institute, 
entitled "The Regions Beyond." 

The author earnestly hopes that every reader of the foregoing volume — 
who believes with him, that the time is short, and that the last command 
of our quickly coming Saviour, " Go ye into all the world, and preach the 
gospel to every creature," ought to be obeyed far more widely and fully 
than it is, — will endeavour to the utmost of his or her power 
to help forward missionary work. Let those who can go, 



704 



APPENDIX. 



GO, AND LET THOSE WHO CAN GIVE, GIVE, THAT THE UTTERMOST 
PARTS OF THE EARTH MAY, WHILE YET THERE IS TIME, LEARN THE 
SALVATION OF GOD ! 

Communications from earnest Christian young men wishing to become 
missionaries, and free-will offerings towards the funds of the Institute, from 
those who wish to aid missions to the heathen, may be addressed to 

H. Grattan Guinness, 

Harley House, Bow, London, E. 



%\t follobhtg arc sum* of t\z JStatioits ottupba bg gUssiouarws 
fojro Ijata bmx ^iubsnis in i\z Institute. 

En ISurope. 



i. w. b. . 

2. e. m. . 

3 . w. B. . 

4. F. B. . 

5. C. B. . 

6. D. C. . 

7. W. C. . 

8. F. E. C. 

9. H. D. . 

10. W. D. . 

11. W. F. . 

12. T. H. . 

13. J. K. . 

14. J. P. • 
is, T. E. R. 

16. R. H. S. 

17. W. S. . 

18. G. T. . 

19. J- W. . 



20. L. D. 

21. A. M. 
>.2. E. S. 
23. R. S. 



24. E. L. 
g 5 . S. M. 
a6. F. P. 



r 7 . M. M. 
28. G. M. 
«. D. V. 



ENGLAND. 

Bible Carriage . . . Itinerant 
Evangelist ... „ 

Missionary to Germans . Whitechapel 

Bible Carriage . . . Itinerant 

Home Mission . . . Sheffield 

Gaelic Mission . . . Hebrides 
Episcopal Minister . . . 

Evangelist . . . Devizes 

Town Missionary . . Hertford 

City Missionary . . Stepney 

Village Pastor . . . Milford . 

Army Scripture Reader . Plymouth 

Village Pastor . . . Watlington 

Master of Children's Home Hackney 

Home Missionary . . Sheffield 
Colportage .... 

Assistant Pastor . . Bury . 

Pastor .... Stratford 

Village Pastor . . . Urchfont 



FRANCE. 

Missionary . . . Mentone 

Ecole preparatoire . . Batignolles 
Mr. McCall's Mission 

Gospel Mission. . . Several Halls 



Missionary 
»» 

Missionary 
Missionary 
Missionary 



SPAIN. 

Figueras 

Leon 

Figueras 

PORTUGAL. 

ITALY. 

Turin . 
BULGARIA. 



N. of England. 

England. 

London. 

N. of England. 

Yorkshire. 

Scotland. 

Isle of Man. 

Wiltshire. 

Herts. 

London. 

Surrey. 

Devonshire. 

Oxfordshire. 

London. 

Yorkshire. 

Yorkshire. 

Lancashire. 

London. 

Wiltshire. 



S. of France. 

Paris. 

Paris. 

Marseilles. 



N.E. of Spain. 
N. of Spain. 
N.E. of Spain. 



Lisbon. 
N. of Italy. 

Bulgaria. 



APPENDIX. 



70: 



£tt gfetau 



CHINA. 



30. 


J- 


A. 




31- 


J- 


A 


• 


32- 


F. 


B. 


. 


33- 


J. 


C. 


. 


34- 


S. 


c. 


. 


35- 


A. C. 




36. 


A 


c. 


0*. 


37- 


AW. 


D. 


33. 


J- 


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. 


39- 


J- 


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40. 


J- 


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. 


41. 


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. 


43 


G 


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44- 
45- 


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S. 


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46. 


H 


T. 


. 


47- 


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48. 


Miss E. ] 


40. 


J- 


c. 




50. 


INI 


. M 




5i- 


J- 


N. 




52. 


H 


P. 


. 



China Inland Mission 
Scottish Bible Society 

China Inland Mission 



Wu-chang (previously in Bhamo,Burmah). 
Hankow (itinerations in province of 

Hunan). 
Kiu-chau (itinerations in province of 

Gan-hwui). 
has traversed China from Shanghai to 

Burmah, now in S.W. China. 
Chung-king . Province of Szchuen. 
I-chang . Province of Hupeh. 

Ta-tung . Province of Gan-hwui. 
Kiu-chau . Province of Chekiang. 

United Methodist Free Church Tientsin . Province of Chili. 
China Inland Mission . Yang-chaw . Province of Kiangsu. 
British and Foreign Bible Soc. Foochow (extensive itinerations in various 

provinces). 
China Inland Mission . Chung-king (itinerations in province of 
Szchuen). 
„ „ . (Itinerations in the provinces of Shensi 

and Kansuh). 
„ „ o Chung-king . Province of Szchuen. 

„ „ . Hangchau . Province of Cheh- 

kiang. 
„ „ . Kiu-chau (extensive itinerations in the 

province of Honan). 
„ „ . Tai-chau . Province of Kiangsu. 

., .. . Nankin . . Province of Kiangsu. 



INDIA. 



Baptist Missionary Society 
Mission to Parsees, etc. . 
Mission to English in India 
Mission to Santhals . 



Jamtara 



Madras. 
Bombay. 
Saharampore, 
Bengal. 



S3- J.J. T. 



SIBERIA. 
Bible Colportage, across southern Siberia, from Perm to Irkutsk. 



SYRIA. 



54. F. W. C. 
55- P- w. . 
56. G. Z. . 


Mission to Arabs . . . Damas 
Missionary .... 
Mission to the Druzes . Itat 




ARMENIA. 


57- Dr. K. . 


Medical Missionaiy. . Tokat 


58. A. H. 


EGYPT. 



Damascus (itinerations in the Hauran). 
Port Said. 
Mountains of Lebanon. 



Turkey in Asia. 



w. 


D 


c. . 


60. 


H 


. c. . 


61. 


C. 


J. . 


62. 


c. 


A. M'K 


63. 


1- 


N. . 


64. 


G 


P. . 


6s. 


H 


R. . 


66. 


— 


T. (dec.) 


67. 


G. 


V. . 


6b'. 


S. 


Z. . 



Utt &ftfrau 

WEST COAST. 

Wesleyan Missionary Society . 

Livingstone Inland Mission Cardiff Station 



Wesleyan Missionary Society Bathurst 

Native Agent . . . Cameroon Mountains Guinea. 

Livingstone Inland Mission near Falls of Yellala Congo. 



Ashantee. 
Congo. 



Gambia. 



Mr. D.Mackenzie's Expedition Cape Juby 



Western Sahara. 



706 



APPENDIX. 





SOUTH AFRICA. 




69. S. A. . 


B.Y.M.F.M. Society . Ikwesi Lamaci 


Kafiraria. 


70. J. A. . 


Missionary 


Dysseldorp . 


Cape Colony. 


71. E. C. . 


j> • • 


Ixopo . 


Kaffraria. 


72. W. K. . 


Evangelist 




Cape Colony. 


73. R- L. . 


Missionary 


Oudshoorn . 


„ ., 


74. J. N. . 


Evangelist 


Cape Town . 


;> )» 


75. M. S. . 


Native Agent . 


Lovedale 


n n 


76. U. S. . 


),>>•• 


,, 


t) >» 




EAST AFRICA. 




77. E. C. H. 


London Missionary Society. Ujiji . _ . 


Lake Tanganyka. 


78. A. R. . 


Free Church Mission. . Livingstonia . 


Lake Nyassa. 


79 . W. S. . 




Ribe . 


Zanzibar & Gall as. 



80. W. H. 

81. W. S. 



82. D. M'D. 



83. J. B. . 

84. D. H. . 

85. B. N. . 

86. W. N. . 



87. G. C. . 

88. J. J. 

89. W. H. . 
00. G. H. . 

91. A. J. K. 

92. J. W. M. 

93. H. T. (dec, 

94. F. T. . 

95. G. W. . 



£n America* 

PRINCE EDWARD'S ISLAND. 

Evangelist . . . Itinerant. 
>> ... j, 

CAPE BRETON. 
Gaelic Missionary. 

UNITED STATES. 
Evangelist . . . Itinerant. 



96. W. B. (dec. 

97. J. F. 
9 S. L. Da S. 



J} 


. . 


iiunois. 
Itinerant. 




JAMAICA 


Missionary 


• • 


Stacey Ville. 

Bethany. 

Bamboo. 


Pastor 
U. M. F. C. 
Evangelist 
>> 


Mission 


Kingston. 
Itinerant. 

BRAZIL. 


Missionary 

Scottish Bible Society 


Pernambuco . 



ARGENTINE REPUBLIC 



;;■ 



F. F. 



En Australia. 



100. F. M. 

101. A. N. 

102. A. R. 

103. J. s. 



204. D. M'L, 
105. W. S. . 



Evangelist 
Episcopal Minister. 
Methodist Evangelist 
Evangelist 



Itinerant 



In Rfcfo Eealanti. 



Presbyterian Pastor . 
Baptist Pastor , 



Greendale 



Brazil. 

M 

» 

S. America. 

Queensland. 
S. Australia. 



Auckland (N. 

Island). 
Canterbury (S. 

Island). 



Butler & Taaner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. 



